Question of forum stats on the Index Page and Post Count

[DdmrDdmr]

I was performing a small(ish) analysis on merit/post on for my local board (Re: Análisis del sMérito en el foro en español ), and resorted to the use of some data I collect to derive the post count. I basically keep track of the number of net posts on local boards on a monthly basis (eventually displayed on the Merit Dashboard such as here: https://public.tableau.com/shared/82RJ6Q2TP?:display_count=y&:origin=viz_share_link)



Now I’ve observed in the past that the readings are weird on some occasions, but I’m not sure of the exact reading behind. For example, on the 23/02/2019, the total number of posts in the Spanish Local board was 247.569. Just over a month later, on the 26/03/2019, the number had gone down to 195.863, which is almost 52K posts (21%) less. The drop was of 28k in Altcoins, 21K drop in Market & Economy, and a 3K drop in Marketplace.

Now the question is, what happens to all those apparently deleted posts? or is it due to a re-index ?

It seems like an extremely high number to delete in a month (perhaps a moderator's purge of some sort?), so perhaps the reason is another, such a corrective re-index on the forum.

Note: This does not happen often. There are a few other weird exceptions on the Russian local boards with a couple of spikes in the opposite direction, and the Chinese board has decreased post count (slightly) each month now for over a year.

Thanks.

Data Source for the above represented anomaly:
Reading on the 23rd of February 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190223151913/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php
Reading on the 26th of March 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190326125551/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php

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[1714946479]

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[tranthidung]

Theymos did it.

I did a recount of post counts earlier today. There are several bugs which cause the post count to drift from its real value over time. The current count is the accurate one.

Just in case you need the time-series plot, on which I only present the medians of daily, weekly and monthly merits distributed on your local boards (Spanish). If you need the plots for weekly, and monthly as well as more stats, please let me know. Enjoy!

• Period: 24/1/2018 - 11/12/2019
• p50: median.

Daily:

Code:

    variable |         N      mean        sd       p50       p25       p75       min       max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      amount |     586.0       7.9      10.2       5.0       2.0       9.0       1.0     100.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Weekly:

Code:

    variable |         N      mean        sd       p50       p25       p75       min       max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      amount |      99.0      46.9      27.5      45.0      27.0      56.0      10.0     177.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Monthly:

Code:

    variable |         N      mean        sd       p50       p25       p75       min       max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
      amount |      24.0     193.6      60.3     182.0     147.0     229.5      89.0     359.0
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[DdmrDdmr]

<…>

Thanks. A re-index was my primary suspicion for the case on the local Spanish board, although other boards did not suffer a similar effect at the time. Perhaps the post count has drifter there further than in other boards.