Ehi Philipp, now Personrank simply is the number of posts submitted by a person, right? Why don't you change it to something more meaningful, such as:

X's Personrank = number of posts by other people that follow each of the X's posts

Example:
X has submitted two posts:
Post 1 starts a new thread and has 1 reply
Post 2 is the 23rd reply in a thread that has 54 post in total
X's Personrank = 1 + (54-23) = 32

This way, a person who post an interesting writing (that has a great feedback) or who joins the more discussed threads before the others do it will rank better than a person who write many not interesting (i.e. without replies) posts.

A more sophisticated formula could be:
Posts following X's ones submitted by other people ^2 / Posts submitted by X
(In the previous example: 32^2 / 2 = 512)
(see http://blogoscoped.com/forum/83810.html)

(Note that, with these formulas, I would have a very low Pagerank...)

Now I don't want to react because I do not want to give you person-rank. ;)

And what about posts on the main-page? They show up under the name of the first replier (is that a word?).

> Now I don't want to react because I do not want to give you person-rank. ;)

:)

> And what about posts on the main-page? They show up under the name of the first replier (is that a word?).

Why not? To be the first, you should read the blog often. And, to obtain a good personrank, you should choose the more interesting main-page-posts (those which will have more replies).

(Instead of "good personrank", I wrote "goog": "dont' be evil, be gooG"!)

Discussions started on the forum page could also add to the PersonRank, especially if they receive a lot of comments. Although it could cause comment spam. I know that I have a 7 person-rank that I am not sure if I deserve – I always seem to find things out about 30 seconds after someone posts about them...Such is life, eh?

The PersonRank is intended to be a very "dumb" indicator of how much of a regular a poster is. While it's not just proportional to the number of comments (there are several other factors taken into account), it's not intended to be or become a quality score.

Now if we talk about a quality score, then we need to consider different variables. Example: post length. Is a long comment always better?
There are two famous quotes coming to mind: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter", and: "brievity is the soul of wit." This is not to say shorter comments are better, what I'm trying to illustrate is that it's hard to even come up with a meaningful quality score. (Or just imagine we had member WhitePowerNow who posts long stupid rants about the superiority of his race – I'd argue the longer his rants, the lower the quality, because his arguments are silly!)

Or take the amount of feedback a person receives. Well, I argue that sometimes, you get the most feedback if you make an obvious error that many people spot! Or if you say something ridiculously provocative (this brings us back to the hypothetichal WhitePowerNow member, I guess). Whereas when your analysis is so superb that it "concludes" a discussion, you may get no reply, except for perhaps a lonely "thanks, that answered all our questions" :)

But again, it might well be that in general, your suggestion *would* make for a reasonable quality indicator. It's just that I want the PersonRank to be a straightforward measurement of a sort of "forum frequency." I also am grateful for every comment someone makes, investing their brainpower and time to make this community become a great place. And then, based on each post, we can personally decide how much we like to read the posts of the different people of us here.

Maybe the "PageRank"-like design of the PersonRank bar is not visualizing this intention well. I chose it because the forum is 80% about Google, so it adds some "Google"-theme, and also, it's a bit more playful this way, as I don't want PersonRank to be something too "serious."

That falls into the category of a brilliant, conclusive and convincing reply that needs no qualification from anyone else . . . Thanks, Phillip, that answered all our questions!

Well I feel like trolling, I just don't know how :P

> it's not just proportional to the number of comments (there are several other factors taken into account

Which? I am curious ;)

> it's not intended to be or become a quality score.

Ok.

> I don't want PersonRank to be something too "serious."

This is clear.

> Which? I am curious ;)

Well, for example when you use a common name and not your full name, you can't achieve PR, simply because so many people use the nickname, and this would skew the actual "frequency" factor (a first time poster named "John" would have a high PR). Another example is that no matter how many comments you make, you can't reach a certain PR immediately, but you need to have posted here for some months.

Additionally, there are also very rare PageRank 100 incidents. They are usually temporary.