It’s been claimed many times that the vast majority of posters have few/no warnings and the like. But in reading old threads it’s striking how many times the “banned” status shows up. So it’s possible that the way the above stats are true is simply by virtue of the fact that people who rarely post are less likely to get warned or banned.
In any event, is there any way to get a sense of approximately what percentage of posts made in the history of this MB were by posters who are currently banned?
You can view posts by post number. Like, Gyrate’s post right above me is post 22324502, and since that’s one of the most recent posts to the board, there are approximately 22 million posts in total.
Now generate a random number between 1 and 22 million, and look at that post. See whether it was made by a banned user. Repeat, say, a hundred times.
EDIT: Oh, and if you’re going to do this, I hope it goes without saying to do it at a time when there’s not much activity on the board.
Does vBulletin have a relational database that can be queried by SQL? If so, it should be fairly simple to get a total number of posts by banned users.
Whether someone with the privileges to access said database is willing to do it, and willing to share the result is another matter.
I believe in the past there have been posters who have complied all sorts of information of this sort (e.g. lists of posters by post-counts and the like) by running some sort of program of their own devising.
Just off the top of my head, I would expect, say, a graph of the likelihood of getting banned versus total post volume to have a bimodal distribution. That is, the level of “ban risk” would peak in two places along the axis of post-count: first at very low numbers where the one-off trolls and spammers get hit with the banhammer, and second at much higher numbers where there’s a significant proportion of people who are really addicted to argument and not very good at self-filtering.
So I would expect a disproportionate number of total SDMB posts to have been contributed by banned posters, for a couple of reasons. One, because high-volume posters are disproportionately represented in total post-count anyway, so banning even one of them has a disproportionate impact on the percentage of posts contributed by the banhammered. And two, because ISTM that being high-volume correlates with a higher level of ban risk in the first place.
A completely unquantified hypothesis thrown in there for what it’s worth: nitpick away.
Sounds right to me. I’m sure we can all think of several high-volume posters who were eventually banned (the first name to pop into my mind had 57,000 posts, which is about 0.25% of all posts).
If you add up all the post values on the front page you get 21,964,706. If there are 22,324,502 total posts on the forums, that means 359,796 posts are missing.
Take that value and subtract the total number of posts in the staff loop, which I assume is its own forum, along with any other hidden non-spam fora. That value is the total number of posts which have been cornfielded or deleted. So that covers your posts from spambots, at least.
Aside: the one millionth post was made by dropzone on December 26, 2000 at 01:42 PM.
The 10th, 100th, 1,000th, and 10,000th were made by unnamed guests. This unnamed guest seems to have the initials C.A., so you’ll have to take those into account during your calculations.
On at least three occasions we’ve banned the poster with the current highest post count. But in two of those cases they had such a high post count because they really, really liked to argue, which had something to do with why they were banned. The other, in the early days of the board, was a poster had such a high total because he was post-padding, which was also a factor in getting banned.
On the other hand, countering the argument by some who say that long-term posters will inevitably get banned because it’s impossible to avoid picking up warnings over time, I checked three posters who are among those with the top number of posts currently, and they have a grand total of one warning between them in a cumulative total of 230,000 posts and 55 years as members.
I did this. Hey, I have a lot of free time these days.
Out of 100 random posts, 3 were from banned posters (edit: three posts from three different banned posters).
One post number came up as “Invalid Post specified,” and another was “you do not have permission to access this page” (I guess one or both of those could be deleted spam posts).
If anyone’s interested, here is the list of posts. Amazingly, one of them is from a guy who calls himself Fotheringay-Phipps.
An inaccessible post is probably somewhere around 60% likely to be spam. For most spam posts, there’s also a report post by a legitimate member, which also gets deleted. And spam and spam reports, between them, are the vast majority of deleted posts.
I totaled the posts of the two most prolific posters I mentioned above, plus another who was banned with a lot of posts. Together they came to 177,000 posts, or about 0.8% of all posts. So a percentage somewhere in the low single digits seems the right order of magnitude.
I poked around a bit, and I believe one of the missing posts (#18226) is attributable to the “Winter of Our Missed Content” outage in 2001-2002. There is a big cluster of missing and no-name posts around that number.
