Yeah there's a ton of garbage being posted in off topic lately. I suspect it's paid sig spammers giving themselves threads to reply to.
I've suggested posts in off topic shouldn't count towards post count.
Hmm, not sure if the people behind the bots are from the paid sigs or not, but a lot obviously just jump at the chance to post something in a nonsense thread as soon as it's posted. Maybe having certain boards that don't affect your post count would cut the down the spam a bit, but I think it'd also just move a lot of it to somewhere else and we'll then see stupid discussions in the politics section or whatever.
I think we should disable the postcount feature entirely, don't you think ? We have activity , that should suffice.