That's an interesting suggestion. As that would be automated, it's essentially still just a post count, but it's a slightly more intelligent version. Kind of a "substantial post" count. The problem with that is that some posts can be longer than two lines and still pointless, and conversely some of the best/most useful/funniest posts are one-liners.

I've also got a possible suggestion for improvement of the hide tag.
At the moment, text is hidden behind a box that, when clicked, takes you to a new page where the hidden text is shown.
This system could possibly be improved by showing the text in the same page as the rest of the post rather than taking you somewhere else. This would be more convenient to users, would probably take up a bit less bandwidth, and would also allow for much easier reading of multiple hidden things.

For example, in the Puzzles and Games thread there might be a puzzle that you're interested by and want to try and solve, but need a bit of a push to start you off. At the moment, hidden text generally just says solutions, but with the new system you could do something like this:

{hide}"(subtle hint)"[/hide]
{hide}"(slightly more obvious hint)"{/hide}
{hide}"(much better hint)"{/hide}
{hide}"(outright solution)"{/hide}

Alternatively, hidden text could also be displayed in the form of {hide}hint1{hide}hint2{hide}hint3{/hide}{/hide}{/hide}, so that to be able to reveal some text, you need to have already revealed all of the text before it. Embedded hidden text currently doesn't work, so this would make the system a bit more flexible as well.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea how easy this would be to code, so it might not be feasible. If it is though, I think it would be a much better way of doing things than we have now.

Yes, that's pretty much it.

So to start with you'd have a box like what we have at the moment, but then when you click it it would just reveal whatever was inside it rather than going to a new page. Kind of as if the poster had typed it without the hide tags.

I like the idea about the hide tags.

But I'm not so sure about post count determined by length of posts. Would that just create longer spam? People may feel they have to post longer, which may lead to pointless padding-out of posts ... ?