Posts Stats Messed Up

[Backpacker534]

Hey, what happened to the "posts" counters? I just noticed after my last post that it now shows me at 160 posts. I know I had about 185 or so. When I looked at the "Members" board I noticed that johnhens is listed as having only 450 posts and I could have sworn he had over 800. It also shows that fonixmunkee only has 223 posts and I know he had more than that too. I thought something just got messed up in my browser so, I logged off, shut down the browser and then logged back in but, the stats are still messed up.

[johnhens]

Perhaps fonix changed the site to the metric system.

[Backpacker534]

Maybe that's it. How does that work? Add 32 and multiply by 5/9? Or maybe it's the square root of {a^3 + b^2 + c} divided by the square miles of Isle Royale....

[Tom]

My guess is that the forum must remove posts automatically after some period of time (or Fonix does it), and the counter is based on 'active/still here' posts. I noticed that posts were no longer available, when I went to find a Minong TR for Jerry that I posted July 2008...

[Backpacker534]

Tom, I think you may be correct. I looked back at all my posts and the earliest one still showing is from October 18, 2008 and I joined on August 21, 2008. It looks like quite a few of my earlier posts are gone so I'm sure it must be the case for everyone else after a certain date. There was a lot of good information from a lot of people on the forum and, there still is but, it's too bad that the oldest info is gone. I'm guessing we must be limited by server space because I've been on various other forums over the years and they have had posts going back years and years, totaling 10's of thousands of messages. Although, those were much larger forums with probably a lot more money than here. Some of them even had advertising which I'm sure helped their revenue stream.

[fonixmunkee]

Har har har, guys...no it's not metric, and no it's not the Fibonacci sequence to figure out your post stats. The explanation is simple, though I didn't intend for this to happen:

I upgraded the forum software the other day, and at the same time ran an auto-prune & synchronization of the board. "Auto-prune" gets rid of old posts and threads that have not been viewed for a long time. When that's run, it deletes the threads & posts. The "synchronization" then went and recounted all the threads & posts and updated all the forum statistics, including everyone's post count. I didn't realize that upon doing this, it would change everyone's post count (and, in turn, their ranking in the forums).

I apologize for the confusion and for "demoting" some users. I guess you'll just have to work your way back up to the upper echelon of the forums again, johnhens.

In the future, I won't resync the stats so this doesn't occur again (auto-prune will stay on to avoid the the database from getting too large and unwieldy though).

[Mandolynn]

Since this happened, "view active topics" doesn't work for me. Is it just me, or is it like that for everyone? Will "view active topics" start working again?

Just curious.

[johnhens]

Har har har, guys...no it's not metric, and no it's not the Fibonacci sequence

I know I have heard this term in a movie, please refresh my memory!

[Backpacker534]

A Fibonacci Sequence is a recursive sequence which can be calculated by the following equation: F(n) = F(n – 1) + F(n – 2). The resulting numbers look like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144..... Basically to get the next number in the sequence you simply add the preceding two numbers. The name comes from a medieval mathematician. This number sequence has fascinated for mathematicians for a long time and the properties of the sequence even show up in nature as grow patterns of sea shells and plants. I thought everyone knew this stuff....