The Rules

What Jacquerel said. I only participate in threads that are interesting to me, but I also am encouraged to keep doing because of the post titles and count. I mean, it just feels good. but it isn't the only reason I post.

I'm talking about people who actually care about their post count, even though it's absolutely meaningless.

I have seen some pretty bad shit in other forums I've participated in. Let's face it, we may as well take measures to prevent it now, even as it's still growing.

Sure, you may not do this. I'm saying that there will inevitably be people who will.

Issues been solved anyway.
Go home, guys.

Go make some suggestions in forum adventures or something.

I don't understand that reasoning. There's no reason not to disable post counts everywhere because it doesn't matter. Yet it is enabled??
There is no reason not to disable avatars and signatures because they don't matter. Yet they are enabled??

I would rather just have it disabled site-wide than have it disabled for one subforum.
If the intention is to prevent aberrant spamming behaviour then this is the most sensible avenue of action to take, else you just have an inaccurate statistic attached to everyone's user data.

To be honest I don't really care one way or the other, as I said earlier, just this seems weirdly inconsistent. If someone's that obsessed with post count, it's easy to make a topic allowing them to boost it in virtually any subforum.
Make a low-effort forum adventure, regularly post in your own art or prose topic, or start a thread about Vriska. All of these can easily produce "low content" posts just as quickly. 
The number just says "posts", not "contentful posts". I feel it should either be there, and be accurate, or (if you really believe it encourages harmful behaviour) just go away.

Would it not possibly just make more sense to add a "Liked Posts" counter as well? Then people can have an actually significant number that more accurately reflects high-content and good posts and is determined by the rest of the community rather than by the poster? Having both I would think would allow those who care about tracking sheer post-count as a measure of self-success/involvement to then be able to keep looking at it like a lil achievment whilst encouraged to make the bests posts possible in order to raise a statistic anyone else would possibly bother with.

Off the topic of post-count, how on-topic do posts need to be? Also, how okay is doing what I am doing right now (using several posts at around the same time to break up topics)? Should there usually be a time delay? Should I wait for a reply? Should I just use edits? What about if I just think of something to add later (especially if there have been no new posts since)?

Maybe someone should test to see if Zalgo text breaks the forums? I could do it if you give me the go ahead.

Thank you. I try to do that stuff anyway (I only double-posted here for the benefit of the question), but I figured asking for clarification would be a good idea.


Thank you again. I really don't know how I should go about executing my "plan" (if you can call it that, it was really more of a suggestion), but maybe someone else knows what to do.

Zalgo text does not break a forum believe it or not! (I feel the rule was VERY badly worded on the old forums.) What Zalgo text does is it breaks out the norms of the standard text area. It doesn't "break" a forum in the way you might think, it "breaks" it by if done right it can over lap itself outside of the text area and into someone elses post. Note that the other person's post is not being changed, it's just that annoying Zalgo is over lapping it.

The reason the rule was likely in place on the old forums is that when trying to do backend stuff, if the page they're trying to edit has Zalgo in it it makes it SUPER hard to see what you're doing until you get rid of it. Zalgo is harmless but possibly VERY annoying when used. It cannot in no way shape or form break a forum/board or cause a hole for hacking attempts no more then using normal text and text based symbols can (ex: ☮ ✿ ✈ ♋ ☠ ☯ ♥ ✌ ✖ ☢ ☣ ☤ ) because that's what Zalgo is, a text based symbol.

So yeah, while it has no chance of breaking a forum a really annoying person using Zalgo could make things hard to read if they spammed it or made their topic title with it. (Which might be impossible if only unicode is enabled for topic titles which it normally is.)


Edit: This isn't me saying we should allow Zalgo, I personally think it's over used and is too easy to make annoying,  just explaining there should be no fear if someone did. Could you think how easy "hacking" could be if someone could just copy paste Zalgo and break webpages?

Double-posting is more of a nuisance than a problem in my experience, but you should probably opt for edits if it's been less than 24 hours if yours was the last post in a thread. You can simply add an "EDIT:" preface to whatever text you add to the original post if you want people to know where the edits begin.