You know, so I could ignore posters such as.... vladimirL. ;o]

An even better option might be to institute some much more aggressive moderation. Perhaps allow a vote of site visitors to classify someone as subject to deletion of any posts at the whim of moderators. =)

We do seem to repeat this sort of situation over and over: someone shows up and likes to respond in every thread. This person generally has little useful knowledge/help to offer, and one wonders what he's doing here in the first place.

Isn't that the Slashdot model of moderating a forum? I think it's a good idea.

Neumann, not really. The slashdot way is that people who are "good posters" by a set of reasonable criteria get to deem others good or bad.

I am in favor of such a system as Psion suggests, although I can't fathom how the interface to such a thing would work, and how you would do resonably democratic nomination for the "fool of the week" while not revealing to said fool who did the nomination. Perhaps just a text box where anyone can suggest a victim's username, and once the number of nominations for a person gets above a certain threshold, notify moderators to delete (or humiliate?) at will.

You could put a button/link/textfield/other in the profile screen to let people nominate for an Asskicking target of the week. Or perhaps a small icon on the posts to give bad points for a particular post. And to discourage message count whores: for every post that get 10 bad points (for example) he/she/it looses 2 messages in his message count.

Does the post count really matter that much? Why is everyone thinking about doing this again?

The message count is completely irrelevant. I think regular IRC meetings where those present decide by consensus to censure annoying posters would be the best thing.

I have an idea.. Remove the 'Membership Stats', and you'll avoid the competition between people who apparently think it's really cool to have the highest post count. :o)

Post count only matters for the side effects (the post count whore syndrome).

I agree with Psion. IRC provides the best solution (no additional code to write, practicaly no chance for abuse).

No i think ANGELOD is right..... I Dont see the purpose in that any way

It was supposed to give an idea of how many people actually participate on the web site. Perhaps removing the numbers would be appropriate to deal with some of our more infantile visitors.

*me runs and hides*

but I was enjoying watching my post count grow. It makes me dream of being as helpful as gian ^_^

but I can see how that could be used for the dark side...

I am concerned that the people on IRC would become biased, there are only a handful of regulars... and even then there aren't many others that stop by occasionally. I can see this (in the worst possible scenario) getting really out of hand. But if you really want a punishment it should be not being able to post for a set ammount of time. Or not being able to log on alltogether.

Linux_Penguin, I'm talking about specially organized meetings. It would be no one's fault but his own if he chose not to be on IRC when things were being decided.