As I was perusing the Bush-Kerry debate thread in GD, I noticed that it had 417 posts in just under 10 hours. I started wondering if there were any other threads that had moved that fast (9 pages in less than a day).
Well, I immediately thought of the first 9/11 thread (World Trade Center Plane Crash), and it only had about 390 or so after 10 hours (yes, I know it was closed, but it was closed after more than 10 hours had passed, so the comparison is accurate enough).
Surprisingly, the if LotR was written by someone else thread didn’t take off right away, having only 13 posts at the 10 hour mark. I’m sure it picks up later, but I don’t know exactly where…
Are there any other threads that have moved faster than this?
I’d have thought a would be a pretty good candidate. It only got 58 replies in the first ten hours, but got 5338 in all. For the uninitiated, this became a game thread in which people began each of their posts with the letter of the alphabet following the one that began the post before them. At some points we were going through the alphabet in minutes, and there’d be sometimes five or six simulposts with the same letter.
But looking at a random 10-hour period starting with the beginning of page 59, posts number 2901 and 3082 were made just under ten hours apart, between 2:31 PM and 22 minutes past midnight. That’s 181 posts.
Unless there were other periods that were significantly more active than this, it would seem it’s not a contender at all.
A lot of old threads are out of the running simply because they were active in a time when the server couldn’t accept that much traffic… people couldn’t load the threads to post to them. It’s possible that we’re setting new records these days.
The thread announcing Wally’s passing may have been a contender, but it seems to have been deleted for some reason. I remember coming in to work that morning seeing it at probably around 8 pages.
That’s 3.7 posts per minute. I’d also guess that if you started counting from where posting started to take off (say 8 or a bit before 8:30, and went until the end of the debate, which is 9:30, I believe), this number will be even higher. I may do that later on.
The speed measured in posts per hour, and determined by counting the actual number of posts made over the past hour, minute-by-minute picks up and drops off rather smoothly. However, measuring from 1 hour into the thread (counting the past hour’s worth of posts…) through to 10:00 PM, we get an average of 316.6 posts per hour. However…
If you start counting at 8:24 and end at 9:23, we find that there are an astounding 370 posts within that hour. That’s a bit over 6 posts per minute, or one post every ten seconds. To that one thread alone. Additionally, the high point for posts per minute was more than twice this. At 8:29, there were 14 posts. At 8:25 and 9:17, there were 13 posts.
In the UK there was a popular TV program called Fantasy Football League. A regular though minor presenter in the series was Angus Loughran. He is a professional sports gambler famous for his encyclopaedic knowledge of trivial sporting statistics, hence his nickname Statto. My memories of Statto were jogged by your posts Garfield226.
