Sorting by “views” only yields the most popular active threads on Straight Dope.
Does anyone know/have an inkling what the most popular threads here on Straight Dope were?
Thanks.
I’d wager it’s the compilation of the Ask the Gay Guy threads.
No idea, I’d assume the threads that keep getting updated.
The thread ‘stupid republican idea of the day’ was started 5 years ago, is still on the front page in the BBQ pit and has 1,768,079 views
Huh. Can’t seem to find the GG threads? Guess talking about stupid republicans beats talking about gay people…
The Lying Whore one was gigantic. The various incarnations of the Zimmerman-Martin threads were more than extensive. I think the grand champion is the “What if Lord of the Rings Were Written by Someone Else”.
Regards,
Shodan
Well there are a few stupid gay republicans. 
Like the type that try and pick up men in airport restrooms.
It looks to me like the OP answered his own question. Sort by views, see what’s on top.
Oh, and this thread should be in ATMB. I’m reporting it for a move.
If I remember right, the longest thread was one that was simply titled “a”. The thread was well over 200 pages before it was finally laid to rest.
Oh, wait, I think I see the problem:
In the bottom of the forum listing, there are three drop-down boxes. You’ve already found the one that lets you sort by number of views instead of the default sort by last post. A couple of boxes over from that is one that says how far back you want to go. The default is “from the last two days”, but you can change it to “from the beginning”.
Won’t give you the popular threads from the days when long threads were routinely shut down. Some of those may have had a chance to continue even down to today, but were closed.
And also won’t give you threads from before the software started counting views. Still, the board has grown with time, so threads that old probably wouldn’t be serious contenders anyway.
Any way to see percentage of board views for individual threads? That might be a good indicator of true popularity. I’m thinking of old threads like What if someone else wrote LORT
What would have been the point of doing that? :smack:
Maybe I should revive an old one that is still open for posting, that had the chance to be popular, and see if we can popularize it second time around lucky? 
Well I am glad you asked that.
Perhaps due to understandability of the discussion.
There becomes a point where the mod can’t say “off topic” because the thread has already inched across to (so many ) topics light years away …
Another issue is the mod can feel that the thread will be infinitely long, since no one could read it all, the content would have to become more and more repetitive… .
But in a computer science point of view… the server people may say that loading the thread is too large a task…
If the data in the database of posts is loaded from hard drive in blocks of megabytes, a 1000 byte post can cause one megabytes to load… and with such long duration, the posts in it can spread through many such blocks… (since the blocks are created over time, and most threads have short lifetime, at least many posts are close together in time… they are naturally best left as time order… ) But a long running thread with many posts can cause loading of many megabyte sized blocks of data just to show it…
OR anyway to the end user the thread becomes a blackhole thread, due to the latency of showing the thread , they think the server has crashed… gives the forum a bad reputation. and if mod’s can’t mod in a practical sense it there’s a problem…
You’ve already found the one that lets you sort by number of views instead of the default sort by last post. A couple of boxes over from that is one that says how far back you want to go. The default is “from the last two days”, but you can change it to “from the beginning”.