Aside from the times when the server has been down has there been an occasion when 24 hours went by without a single post?
I haven’t the first clue how one would search for that jewel of information, but I was curious if any of you can recall such a day.
And if there is such a day, did the non-post period extend longer than 24 hours? And if so, how long?
I doubt there were any days pre-1992 where there was a post.
So much for a well-worded OP. :o
I’ve wondered about things like this. As far as no posts, I’m going to guess, that once the posts/day avg. got above , say, 20 or so, it never happened, just because of the statistical near impossibility of it. It’s questions like these where we would do well to invent a god machine, to answer questions like, has there ever been a day where no one on earth said the word “rumpus”, or, what is the total mass of all the poop i’ve produced compared to a)the average 30 year old, b)queen elizabeth
I will admit that it’s a far-fetched notion, but there are days when it seems to me that the post rate drops off (for whatever reason) to just a few per hour. I’m usually in New Posts mode and when I refresh the page there are times when the same thread stays on top for several minutes. It just seemed possible that on days when there’s been some really unusual event like a big brownout or blackout or a really big TV event that might draw people away from The Dope, that it might at least be possible.
And yes, let’s get us a God Machine!
I had a God Machine for a while, but I lost the AC adapter and it goes through like 24 D cells in about 15 minutes. I think it may be down in the basement closet next to my old perpetual motion machine, or perhaps in the garage in the box with my left handed smoke shifter. I’ll check in the morning.
Fool! Connect the one to the other!
Didn’t the boards transition from a newsgroup? So, as the newsgroup was already very frequently utilised, the boards would’ve also been very quickly contributed to, is my guess.
or use the 15 minutes to ask it where the ac adapter is!
brillian, js. he could also use the 15 minutes to ask it where the ac adapter is!
I doubt that a big event would draw too many people away from the Dope (unless the internet itself was down in many places). Many posters seem to come here to post about current news events.
Heck, I first found out about 9/11 on the SDMB. I read a live thread about the news, the towers falling, etc… It was kind of freaky actually. I was in a computer lab on my campus and as soon as I saw the posts on the Dope I hightailed it over to a building that had TVs - which had huge crowds standing around watching the news.
It gets fairly quiet here some parts of some days of the year. I’ve noticed this a couple of times, then suddenly realised “Ah! it must be Thanksgiving!”. Never anywhere near as quiet as no posts for 24 hours, but slow enough that a person could be the last to post in threads in all forums at once, I think.
Now there’s something to shoot for! Or the ultimate prize: the last post in every active thread!
This known on other boards as ‘forum domination.’ Typically accompanied by a screenshot and bragging.
Incredibly easy to (superficially)fake by saving the page, then editing the text in the HTML file - I did it once, for this board. Impossible to create a convincing fake though, since posting times and dates are a matter of record.
I have been around for almost 7 years. It didn’t happen and it would be one of the most unlikely things ever to guess about if it did. There have been about 8,000,000 posts to this board since it was started give or take. That makes roughly 3000 per day. Even if you dropped that down to 500 a day at a low point, it would be pretty incredible for that all to just drop to zero one day.
However, if you want to count the Winter of Our Missed Content, there was a little lag I believe from the time this board collapsed and a temporary board was created for shipwreck survivors. We stayed in that lifeboat for a while (a couple of months or so IIRC).