Post Counts

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Technical Administrator
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Post Counts

Post by Technical Administrator »

Many members have commented that their post count is not as large as it was before, and are confused as to how it could have been reduced so much.

The simple answer is: The reason you have a smaller post count is because you have less posts. This is why.
  • Pruning. Many old posts have been pruned from the database in order to make room for exciting new topics. Most of this pruning was old topics in Off-Topic Antics. This may not have been noticed, as these would be old posts, but it has been done and it does reduce the number of posts for all people involved in said pruned topics.
  • The crash. After the crash, the posts table had to be repaired or we would have had to simply start over with 0 posts. No one would have wanted this, so the posts table was repaired. I'm not going to get too technical, but due to the crash there were some posts that were just plain unrecoverable and the number of rows in the table was fixed.

    This means that some posts in various topics are gone. This may or may not have hit some people worse than others, as it seems that many of those posts were not seen or noticed by many members. But this is another reason for the loss of posts.
Speaking on behalf of the administrators, I can understand being upset at the reduction in your post count. Post count is a mark of status which differentiates active members from the common lurkers on our board.

However, your post count now is only very slightly reduced; you may have believed it was much larger, but in reality only few posts were lost. Also, remember that this has happened to everybody, so your post count is still the same amount in proportion to the total posts on the board that it was before.

Please don't send us any of the following U2Us:
  1. Can you help me, I had 5000 posts but now I only have 272. Can you set my post count to 5000?
  2. You're just being mean and reducing the post counts of everyone you don't like (i.e., everyone, apparently), because.... well.... because... you're mean, that's why!!1!one
The answers would be, respectively:
  1. No.
  2. Superb reasoning. You've discovered our secret!
We take pride in the fact that the post counts on our board are always correct, even of the admins (unless, of course, they're negative). True post counts help new members to gauge a member's status on the board and remind them that respect must be shown.

Please understand why this has happened and that there's little to no impact on your post count and no impact to Nightscrawlers's respect for its members, especially veterans.

Thank you,

-Northstar
Technical Administrator
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