I wouldn’t label this as an “unsuccessful” thread by any measure, since it’s on its fourth page and got a reply just two days ago.
But it does appear to be one of those threads that many View without doing a Reply.
From time to time I do a vanity search to see if threads I posted to have had new responses since my last visit. That’s how I spotted this one. I went back maybe 20 pages in my vanity search and couldn’t find a thread with at least 100 Replies and with more than 11,415 Views.
Satisfying Andy Licious. His thread, Arnett: We had to destroy the village in order to save it?, has fifteen replies and 32,204 views for a 1:2147 post to view ratio, 2.6 times your blimp thread. And Lynn Bodoni would be (y)our mother with the 1:4089 Pit Rules (4.9 your thread; 1.9 his) but I don’t think it should qualify with it being an administrative thread.
My own seem to fall in the 1:30 to 1:40 range although I was surprised to discover that a thread started by me is both the second highest viewed and third most posted to thread in General Questions to date.
Okay, when I first saw this thread I thought the title was "thread with the highest views:reptiles ratio. I had to stop in and see what that was all about, but now I am sad by the lack of reptiles in this thread.
Every one of the many, many threads with zero replies has an infinite views-to-replies ratio.
(Come on, this board is loaded with anal-retentive mathemtical types. You knew somebody was going to point that out eventually!)
Among zero-reply threads, we can only compare the number of views. At the moment, in GQ, there’s a question about astronaut rescue that has 174 views and no replies. This is an unusually large number; usually a difficult question or topic will get about 100 views before it sinks out of sight or draws a reply.
The reverse phenomenon is also interesting: threads with very low views-to-replies ratios. The trick to drawing few views and lots of replies is to phrase the question so that (a) people who aren’t interested will blow off the thread completely; but (b) among people who are interested, absolutely everybody will have an opinion and reply.
Questions about cats meet both criteria. “Why is my cat indulging in this particular (adorable but unusual) behavior” will inevitably draw a views-to-replies ratio approaching 1.000.
