Postcount Mania?

[Floris]

How important is it to you, or your search engine visitors, to see a site with a post count, or to have a post count that is bigger than the other guy's? Hm, I think I am 50/50 on it. On one side I believe that having a forum that looks active will attract more visitors to dive inside and find out what's new then. While on the other hand, it shouldn't matter at all. Who cares if you have 50 and they have 500, or you have 5000 and they have 25.

I am considering to just have a collection of messages available to guests but not members. And have posts not display the count. The latter is default to Xenforo, clicking the avatar will disclose their message count. That membercard overlay is perhaps something I might want to remove it from on some communities.

What do you do, and what is your opinion about the mania for postcount?

 

[melbo]

When I was first starting a forum, I felt it would be beneficial to look a little busier than we were. I and a few friends fired up a few alternate accounts and started to post. We also cranked our cookie clock up to 3 hours. I don't know if its important or not and maybe it's just me as a forum owner but I almost always glance at WOL when I visit a new forum. Maybe a higher membership count and post count lends some authority to the site? Maybe a lot of posts mean that the information you seek might be inside?

 

[TilkiBey]

the post count is important for me
for an example, i saw a new forum site (actually not new but i just saw =) )
i look to forum statistics' area at first
and, the second step is will be look for admins' post counts
example: 10k messages in forum, but, 8k is bout RSS BOT, 1k is bout admins, 1k is bout users
i think, this forum as like as o trash

or, 100 messages for a day
but, this messages 50% is written by a user (admin, manager, moderator bla bla bla)
the other 50 messages is written by 2-3 users
if this forum isnt a support forum ( like here, like xen-tr) this is a very problem for forum activity

in short, message counts is important for my opinion