A thought about post counts. Options

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In my short experience as a CreateBlog community member, I have realized post statistics do play a significant role in the user's experience since they grant access to extra features and are a requisite (that can be bypassed in exceptional occasions) to apply for staff membership. This is the not the first place where I have seen this system being used, and thusly it is not the first time I pass this thought to the community to consider. Without further ado, I'll proceed to explain my position about this subject.

In my opinion, post quotas only manage to make users work enough to meet them in order to enjoy the benefits they get for reaching the 50, 100, etc.., post mark. Such acting is not necessarily linked to making users involved in improving the community, but rather in seeking personal goals that may or may not transcend (positive or negatively) onto the rest of users.

That is mainly because apart from the site's general rules, there's not a standard establishing how a person should fill the demanded rate. Since it's pretty easy to maintain a high PPD ratio without adding anything that contributes to the site in general while avoiding the violation of any general rule, the point of having a posts limit becomes kind of moot, in the end.

Lastly, keeping a post count policy seems to have stemmed an underlying rivalry between users based upon the number of posts when it comes to, for example, hiring sessions. Despite knowing it's not a must-meet requirement, people seem to focus first on their PPD then on evaluating whether their skills can be of any help to Createblog or not. And that is pretty counterproductive to the purpose of selecting people willing to sacrifice time and efforts for an online community.

[*I Shot JFK*]

Accepting that a benchmark post count fiure is more of a motivation to produce quantity over quality, how would you suggest we motivate members to produce higher quality posts? Also, I would point out that, with this very concern in mind, posts in the Sandbox and Introductions do not count towards a user's total post count.

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Accepting that a benchmark post count fiure is more of a motivation to produce quantity over quality, how would you suggest we motivate members to produce higher quality posts? Also, I would point out that, with this very concern in mind, posts in the Sandbox and Introductions do not count towards a user's total post count.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's possible to motivate users in that sense at all; that's what my experience in online communities has shown me so far, unless the forum were to adopt a set of draconian rules which would turn CB into an iron-fist ruled, enlightened dictatorship of sorts. If that were the case, CB would be more elitist, significally smaller and more than likely less fun overall.

See, everybody has to make 200 posts to get access to an advanced set of features, however it is ultimately a personal choice what those posts are going to end up looking like. One could write 200 amazing posts, 100, or just go through the Interests section and post one-line comments randomly until meeting the desired quota. There's 12 boards in there the rules of which do allow such practice (the Sandbox and Debate would be out of the question).

Controlling the rate at which the user base increases is necessary, since more users equal more money being put into maintaining CreateBlog online. For this reason alone, I don't completely object the idea of having flood control measures. Therefore why I'd like to debate which would be the best option in that sense. Or if there's such thing as a better option than what we have, even.