I'm bored, so I downloaded my posting history and here are some stats

About This Message Board
1

(Don’t know where to put this, but since it is kind of ‘about this message board’, just placed it here.)

Bored, so I downloaded my posting history, imported the CSV into Excel, did some data cleanup (removing quotes, mostly), threw together some basic pivot charts and here are my stats:

Posts

Number of Posts: 27,112
Posts per day: 3.71

First post, was actually an OP posted on July 7th, 2001: Has there been a “live” suicide on American TV?

Words

Most words in a single post: 3,078, but “The Journey” easily outpaced that with 6k of words… but I broke it up into 6 posts for clarity purposes.

496 1-word posts (for some reason, a word + a URL counts as one word… so I’ll accept that.)
296 2-word posts
2 posts exactly 1,255 words long, the largest word count with more than 1 entry

Total words written on the SDMB: 1,995,480
Average words per post: 74
Words per day: 273

Topics

Total Topics created by yours truly: 10,406
Topics per day: 1.42

Top 10 Topics which I replied:
Bakers Dozen - 811 posts
Clusterfuck - 677
Mueller Investigation and Crimes - 571
Disgraced Ex-President Trump’s 2016 Campaign thread - 379
Impeachment Enquiry - 292
Butt-Hurt Trump Takes to Twitter - 245
Trump Associates Coordinated with Russians - 205
Clusterfuck 2: 201
100 Most Influential People - 146
American Coup - 140

The above 10 topics were a combined 3,667 posts, or 13.5% of my total posting activity. And, given the topics, you can see that much of my time was dealing with You Know Who.

Date/Time

Most prolific year: 2019, with 3,103 posts
Least prolific (full) year: 2005, with 499 posts
Most prolific hour: 3-4pm, 2,020 posts (there’s a 25% chance I’ll post something in this time block, so press refresh often!)
Least prolific hour: 9-10am, 53 posts

2

Does Discourse have a utility for that type of analysis, or did you brute force it?

And what time zone are you posting from (so we can know when to look for your activity)?

3

Central (US).

I brute forced it via Pivot tables in Excel. I said ‘charts’ in the OP, I offer my usual defense: go with what I mean, not what I say. :wink:

4

I’m pretty sure I used to see you posting Greasemonkey scripts. I’m not really equipped to go with either one, much of the time.

6

Very interesting. I’m fairly sure you’ve written more words on this board alone than I have in my elementary + junior high + high school + college + professional career combined (and the world is better off for it!)

I don’t know whether the SDMB owns the copyright to our posts, but if not, when it comes time to write your memoirs, consider bundling up all these posts and selling them in a multi-volume printed form.

7

I think it’s @BigT who did the Greasemonkey.

Excel has a way of downloading a bunch of web pages?

8

This I found interesting. You are more likely to post between 2-3am than 9-10am. That seems pretty unusual. Unless maybe this doesn’t take time zone differences into consideration.

9

Indeed I did.

I presume he went to his Activity page (from clicking on his avatar in the top menu) and then clicked the “Download All” button on the side. I just did it myself, and, after a little bit, @system sent me a message with a 13.3 MB zip file. Inside of it are several CSV files, one of which is user_archive.csv and contains all of my posts and PMs.

10

Yup. Then did what I mentioned upthread.

11

Note that your downloaded activity will also include any deleted posts.

Part of the design thesis of Discourse is “your data belongs to you”, that’s why there’s a download button on everyone’s user profile.

12

I think it’s GMT. 9-10am GMT is 4-5am Central.

13

Okay, so then it is a time zone thing. That makes sense. :slight_smile:

14

Ah, OK, I didn’t know about that “download my activity” feature. I’ll have to keep that in mind, in case I ever get curious, too.

15

Given how up in the air everything is about this place (seemingly, tbh), there is no reason not to download your history NOW. If we close in a year and I don’t D/L again, I’ll still have 90%+ of my posting history… which is better than zero.