Postcount conditional problem

[the Sandman]

I'm trying to add a conditional to my postbit which will prevent signatures being shown if the poster has a postcount less than 10. I've added:

$post[posts] >= 10

to the existing conditional around the signature in the postbit which now looks like this:

<if condition="$post[posts] >= 10 AND $post['signature'] AND !$vboptions['shownsigs'][$post[userid]] AND $vboptions['shownsigs'][$post[userid]] = true">
		<!-- sig -->
			<div>
				__________________<br />
				<br />$post[signature]
			</div>
		<!-- / sig -->
		</if>

This works fine except that posters with over 999 posts don't have their signatures shown either.

According to Andy, in This Thread at vB.com, the problem is that when a number is greater then 999 it is converted to show a comma, so when it became a number like 1,000 you cannot use the <= sign or similar. You have to remove the formatting first in the appropriate php file.

So how can I get this to work? I know I can set up a promotion scheme, but I have a lot of additional groups, many of them public groups, so it becomes very messy. It would be much easier to use the conditional if I could get it to work.