That is the exact intent. They will post untill they are full (4 posts), not untill they have flooded the new posts list with useless replies. The only reason, then, for more than 4 posts per day to appear is if they all have purpose. With or without the new bar, people are trying to get "maximum activity". This way they know when to stop, helping to reinforce the purposes of the activity bar.

Edit:

J_iceman said: WetWired said: "All these stars" total less than 2 KB when combined. still though i remember it going faster BEFORE all these changes.....it goes so slow that when i post, it double post :-( is it the zelaron network? i dont get any other problems in other forums! Dunno. It may have been going slightly slower for awhile because of me generating fake visit logs based off of postings, then after that as I forced an activity recalculation based off this new data, but at this point anything in the new threads should be clean and load at normal speed. The only reason for slow down would be if you've been thread digging. Warning: Long Technical Discussion Follows The activity for a user is only recalculated the first time it is needed each day. Generally, this means a noticable slowdown at midnight, as every user in the first few threads loaded is recalculated, but within about 100 thread views, the majority of active posters should be covered and only one or two users per thread should need recalculation. If you thread dig, however, and hit threads rich in inactive members, you will still encounter slowdown. Unfortunately, due to the architechture of vB2, a query is performed for each user in a thread to determine whether or not to recalculate; I could remove this at the cost of recalculating the same user several times if they posted alot in the thread. Hmm...