Quote:
Originally Posted by Ledgem
I like western-style forums, with their user accounts, because the sense of community is greater. You can take interest in the people you're talking with, and not just the basic information in their post. Age, join date, gender, choice of user avatar, location - all of these are intriguing facts about the person whose thoughts and opinions you're reading and interacting with. They add "flavor" to posts and can aid in understanding what a person is trying to say, and why they're saying it. I don't think I'm unique in saying that I am not blinded by user information or that it heavily biases me when I read someone's posts. This concern that the personal information somehow gets in the way of discussion really seems like a non-issue. My worry is what effect this drive for "depersonalization" would have on the sense of community in the forum.
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I will ask you this: in what way number of posts and join date have any effect of the personality of a member?
Frankly, I don't really care if the join date stay or is removed (and the idea never crossed our mind in the mod team), but talking about it, I surely see no reason to keep it either.
It is really not the same as username, avatars etc: username define the user (obviously) so not only you can track their posts later on and identify them, whereas Signature and Avatar give a quick idea of what they currently like/promote and so on.
However, what is the importance of the join date here? I sincerely see nothing much aside of how long the member has been around, and that doesn't say much if they went on hiatus for a long time, to which happened to various members, "unknown" or "popular" alike.
It doesn't define the "identity" of the user, unlike age and gender. It is probably because I hardly have any notion of "elder - junior" regarding any community in the internet, but frankly I put personality on a specific member with their tastes (anime list, avatar, signature, title), arguments and writing style, and other interactions if there is any.
Pretty much like Solace, that pulled me a "yeah why not?" but hardly anything to debate, considering it doesn't really harm anything (unlike post count that surely have potential negative effects, and the rep system).