Talking about our number of posts. (Spin-off from the Trolls R Us thread.)

8,700 replies over 3,000 visits; my Blabex is 2.9.

I’ve created 234 threads.

I think I’ve been here about 19 years.

I don’t think this thread counts, since we’re not really celebrating post-count milestones here. I think.

Here’s Colibri’s take on it from 2016

Thank you!

I just did a bunch of research on Discourse’s support forum & documentation. Piecing together a lot of partial info that’s not well-documented as such …

It’s kinda complicated.

The short-ish version is that whenever you have a post on the screen, a timer is running and that info is sent back to Discourse every time you enter or leave a page or scroll up or down so a new post appears. There’s also a feature to stop timing if you quit interacting with the screen, like if you put a post up on your screen, then go to lunch. You won’t get an hour of credit for “reading”, just a couple minutes before it notices your inaction and stops the counter.

Read time is tracked for every post and separately for every logged-in user. So as e.g. you are reading any post, your personal lifetime read time is incrementing one second per second. Meanwhile while any/everyone is reading e.g. this post, this post’s lifetime read time is also being incremented one second per second for each user reading it.

What’s not specifically tracked is how much time e.g. you spend reading e.g. this post.

So that’s where the number comes from. You actively interacting with your browser while there’s a post displayed on it, and you’re not writing a new post.

Now to display:
They display your total read time on your personal profile summary page, and on the Users roster page as a simplified duration in the largest unit of measure that you have at least one of. So akin to how they display the age of posts in a thread. It’s in minutes until it’s an hour old, then it’s expressed in hours until it’s a day old, then in days until it’s …

So for example, somebody with “10 months” of read time has read a number of seconds that’s more than exactly 10 months and less than exactly 11 months of duration. For exactly 10 months that’s 10 months * 30 days / mo (simplifying) * 24 hours / day * 60 minutes / hour * 60 seconds / minute. Which is 25,920,000 seconds.

What actually happens is the opposite. Your cumulative reading time has been recorded with one second precision as, e.g. 25,925,345 seconds (and counting). Which is simplified / truncated to “10 months” for display.

My belief is these stats were not collected in anywhere near the same form under vBulletin, and therefore they represent our read time only since the transition to Discourse. Which occurred in Jun 2020, a month shy of 6 years ago now. (Wow, time flies!)

Right now SDMB has been active on Discourse for 71 months. Somebody with a 10 month reading score has spent roughly 10/71 ~= 14% of their recent life reading the Dope. If we allow for sleeping about one third of their life, that’s ~21% of their waking hours reading the Dope.

On the Users page, the [Time Read] column can’t be sorted. But working from the display sorted by [Posts Read] as a decent proxy, and poking around a little, it seems that our current leaderboard tops out with @BippityBoppityBoo at 11 months. A handful of folks are not too far behind at 10 months, then pretty quickly it drops off to 5 months then we get to the long tail, then the very long tail.

I’m a 10-monther. And that’s roughly 30 million seconds of my life I’ll never get back. I think I should be horrified at this. I probably am horrified.

And now you know …
The rest of the story …
Good day.

Mom voice: Now go outside and play! Get your face outta that screen!

About 7.5 posts per day average, if I worked it out right. Yup, I talk a lot. But that seems plausible; I post in a lot of different threads.Going to do something else for a while now.

Kind of funny to see this thread from 2008 suggested:

Here I am, duly chastised. After reading that old thread! Jeez! brutal…I’d have been right out on my ear with that bunch.

Sounds about right. 17 years, still a neophyte.

Was interested to review the top posters by post compared to by topic started.
Of the top 20 all time posters, (only) 3 are in the top 20 all time topic starters.