But, more than that, you can do it “sub rosa” without waiting for a maintenance run.
Just tell only one else the exact minute you are enabling the button. Then Bill H. or your tech guy (sorry, I can’t recall the name) can collect the stats while we’re all unaware and turn the block back on before anyone’s the wiser.
This a board milestone, and even if you keep most of the data secret for some reason there’s no reason not to collect it.
This has nothing to do with the only the “highest posters” counting. I don’t even know how you came to that conclusion.
If we do it once, I can only assume that people will request access on a regular basis. Every month or so someone will go on a posting spree and will want to see how much their post rate improved.
And I personally don’t see the point. Is it to establish some kind of heirarchy? It’s a useless statistic. It would be maybe worth one thread. A few people would have sigs about it. “Alphagene: determined to be the 74th most prolific poster on the SDMB!” Weee.
Besides, this whole allowing access for just one minute while coordinating it so that another poster (and only one poster) can access it and then close up access scenario would really be a pain to execute. And the minute we start tinkering around with the technical aspects of a website to produce data that has absoluetly no benefit to said website, then we really start to lose touch with what this website is about. You know, that whole Cecil Adams thing. Remember him?
If you really must know, why dont you find the date you registered from your profile, calculate the number of days you’ve been a member, divide the number of posts by the number of days and viola your post rate. See? We don’t need to tinker with tech stuff at all!
Have fun! And when you figure out who posts the most per day, let me know. We’ll have a parade. With balloons!
Seriously, while the numbers are somewhat interesting, if it would cause problems or complications (or just not be worth the effort), I can understand and certainly accept why they shouldn’t be made available. Should the technology ever be possible to make this information available without undue stress or work on the part of the good people that make this site possible, yes, I’d be curious as to seeing the numbers, too.
Though I agree that, while harmless I suppose, the “title” of “most posts”, and “most posts per day” is, at best, misleading. As I’ve said on the third page of this thread:
Generally, we DON’T disclose security considerations, unless we must. And I, for one, am reluctant to put one iota more of strain on the server unless it’s absolutely necessary. This isn’t necessary.
The Member List function provides more data than just names and post counts. That is where the security concerns are. To get it to provide only data useful for determining post totals would require rewriting a whole buch of vBulletin’s software. Not really worth the difficulty.
No it doesn’t, not really. It gives the “Bio” info, but only a few people use that, and it’s available by the buttons anyway. Most vB boards have a member function, and it’s not a problem.
The bottom line is that the negatives vastly outweight the positives. There are security concerns and the coordination involved in allowing a non-Administrator into this section for a brief period of time is just too clumsy. What are the positives? “It’s fun”? :rolleyes:
You think there are no security concerns. Fine. But we do. And we hold the key. Not so sound like a prick about it, but its our call to make and our call is that it’s just not worth it.
Hey, if all the 'Dopers got together and raised the 15 grand (or however much it was said to be) for a new server, THEN will you allow us access to the Membership stats?
We’ve been through this, too. The Reader can’t really accept donations, collecting the donations would be a pain and there’s more that needs to be upgraded besides the server. See Ed’s response here.
Honestly though, you guys are way to giddy over this Member button thing. Why do you kids need a completely arbitrary and ultimately pointless ranking system?
Hey, it’s important to many species of lesser primates to be able to send a stream of urine farther than anybody else in the troop. Don’t you watch the Discovery Channel, Alphagene?
