So, to be consistent with yourself, Punki, you must presumably applaud with both hands post-padding, since the person who writes "great post by the OP" in 500 threads is showing much more devotion to FT "one way or another" than the poster who just gives a considered answer to questions in just 50 threads?

The problem with your analysis, as I see it, is that post count per se is not a reliable indicator of meaningful participation in the community. So, displaying the post count as a "community"-gauge is inviting readers to jump to conclusions on the basis of garbage information. Not all "glimpses" on members necessarily convey meaningful information. Knowing how often a person visits the bathroom everyday would also give us a "glimpse" on them. This would not make it useful and meaningful quality information.

What makes things even worse is that the very fact of suggesting that this could be regarded as a participation-gauge tends to increase the likelihood of it being an even less reliable measure, as this brings us back to boys' metrics and "my post count is bigger than yours, hence I am a better FT member"-type competitiveness.