I think we should expand our user card to include post counts:
Additionally maybe consider adding a row for Last Seen - perhaps a separate feature req/
Thoughts?
3 Likes
Never cared much for post count and always loved the fact that Discourse de-emphasises them, and I donāt see whatās so useful about them that they need to be in the user card either. āLast seenā on the other hand is something I would frequently want to check for.
Not saying post count would necessarily become problematic here, and Iām sure some communities would like it, but I donāt wanna see the user card get to crowded. If I had to choose between the two as a default Iād go with āLast seenā.
2 Likes
Post count is one of those things old-school forum users are often looking for. I guess its an indicator of āhow long have you really been aroundā.
2 Likes
I donāt think post count is an interesting metric; I had some other ideas:
I need to know when this person is around? Tell me when this person is most likely to post based on statistics, what day of week, what time of day. Ideally a graph like we did on chat.stackexchange. So for Tim Post http://chat.stackexchange.com/users/224/tim-post we can see that heās most likely to post on Wed, Thu, Fri around 06:00 to 16:00 hours.
This would cover ālast seenā. Doesnāt need to be a full bore graph, just some basic text like ātends to post Wed, Thu, Fri from 3pm to 11pm your timeā. Now you know when this user will be around based on participation data. (I think we have to base this on posts, otherwise it gets weird.)
I need to know who this user is? Show my previous interactions with the user, because, āitās all about meā. Display this userās recent replies to me (quotes and post replies and @name mentions), any recent PMs I had with this user, and a total count of likes to and from this user. Me me me me me. Whatās my prior history with this user? What did we last talk about, and when?
I need to know if this is an avid user? Show total read time, total posts with viewed flag set, and total topics entered. If we must display āstreet credā, this is a better metric. You donāt want to have a conversation about WW2 with the guy who just skimmed the wikipedia entry, you want to have a conversation about WW2 with the guy who read the entirety of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
7 Likes
I agree that we can provide much richer metrics, no argument there. I just feel that adding post count is a trivial change that provides value. That number alone can easily tell me how long a user has really been around.
These are 2 minor changes that can provide value that come at a tiny cost of 20 minutes of work. Doing all the metrics stuff is a major piece of work that is not practical before v1.
Post count is ubiquitous on all forum software, usually way more prominent than the user card. Adding it makes stuff less surprising for users that came from that world.
3 Likes
I would vote for going ahead with this if itās easy, and agree itās helpful to be able to see right in the user card how active in the forum the person is.
Also love love love love (love) the idea of more metrics including time of day, avidity, closeness to me. But all of that I think should live on the profile page where you can also already see how many posts, likes given and received etc a person has contributed.
On the user card maybe some sort of a temperature gauge indicating avidity (both forum-wide and category-specific?) and connection to me would help.
I can only support making the user card an editable template, where they can put whatever fields they want from the user profile there. I do not support making post count part of something we ship as default.
3 Likes