Yeah, seems logical to have it the other way around. I think post count should show up automatically as well as you have to enable that and it seems to lead to some confusion with people thinking activity is their post count.
Man, this has been a revelation to me despite having looked through the profile/forum preferences beforehand, I had hardly any non-standard settings.
Just enabled the post count option, also I changed the date format and applied the forum time offset.
Looking forward to the new forum software, while this software serves its purpose for users it is undoubtedly behind with the times in many respects - the conversation thread for messages being one.