As of this week, Wisterwood has a complete archive of just about one year of PMS. As I promised DIM, AMan, and Utar, here are some numbers.
http://arfer.net/pms/x/stats-2010-2011
I used all posts within the named dates, which is only a subset of Wisterwood because it also has a few topics from 2007, 2008, and 2009, before I was archiving every post. I've done my best to collapse across alts, although there are some alts left (like SparatcusPMS) whose owners I'm unsure of.
First up is a ranking of everybody's verbiage, calculated as the sum of the lengths of all their posts. I removed signatures and HTML tags and decoded entities first. This preprocessing step had a bigger effect than you might think: without it, I'd be #1. With it, PMS's true king of walls of text takes his rightful place at the top. I, having never failed to love hearing myself talk (or at least reading my own writing), come in second. BUM rounds out the 100 KB club. Alex is at #4, his sigless posts largely untouched by the preprocessing. Honorable mentions in this dubious contest are due to Jon and the two Georgians (that is, the two Georgians who are still around) for passing the 50 KB mark. (Notice that although AMan's byte count is higher than Pooty's, his word count is lower. What's up with that? Perhaps AMan uses longer words. Or perhaps he just posts more URLs.)
Next is a simple count of posts. Once again, William and yours truly are ahead of the pack, but this time, the narrow lead is mine. HeyDude has a respectable third place with nearly 400 posts. James, BUM, and Pooty come next with about 300 apiece. Travis isn't too far behind with 251. AMan, Spock, Kylo, and Toaps have just broken 200, and Nick is close.
When it comes to number of topics created, the winner is again no surprise, and he's got one heck of a lead. We can expect his hundredth topic (well, his hundredth since April 12, 2010) in the near future. Spock is second at nearly 60. Brandon and I aren't too far behind. Wil is just ahead of Nala, while Travis, the other Mark, Kylo, Alex, and Smithy cluster around 30.
The next two tables… well, they speak for themselves.
But speaking of topics, next is a ranking of topic lengths. Like I mentioned before, the real winner in all of Wisterwood is topic 40880141, which weighs in at 75 KB, 14,466 words, and 168 posts, but fortunately, it's too old to be eligible here. The #1 and #2 spots are both occupied by religious debates, demonstrating that whether your god is Jesus of Nazareth or Richard Stallman, chances are you like expounding on his teachings at length. (The intended subject of the #1 topic has recently come full circle with topic 58625616.) In third place is another topic about sex, a subject almost as sensitive as religion, although this topic certainly owes some of its length to Cheez's decision to leave. At #4 and #5 we have two excellent philosophical conversations started by BUM. Smithy's epic weight-loss topic is the longest living topic at 24 KB. Then comes Wil's extended analysis of some Star Wars movies. #8 is the old cooking topic. The longest Anthony topic is next, followed by my own spinoff of said topic.
The neat thing about the weight-loss topic is that it's not only the longest living topic but also the longest-living topic, that is, the one with the longest duration between its first and last posts. Mith's Now Playing topic is a distant second. It's followed closely by the cooking topic and the National Novel-Writing Month topic.
I leave you with the following amusing coincidence:
http://arfer.net/pms/topics/56107821#post006
http://arfer.net/pms/topics/57989511#post004
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"And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee…"
I just wanna say a) that I REALLY like this topic and b) that I'm shocked Jace isn't as high in the numbers as I was thinking he'd be. I guess James might be glad to know that he's not alone in propping PMS up.
I like this. I appreciate this. This does my body good. This makes me feel warm. I want to enjoy this for a while more. I'm glad I was able to be a part of this.
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"...you should try reading my posts being getting all emo." --FoxMetal
I shall echo Alex's sentiments exactly.
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
http://img716.imageshack.us/i/newpostsbydate.jpg/
By accident, I didn't include any data from April 8, 9, 10, or 11, so I've regenerated the report.
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"And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee…"
This is great. Really, really great.
Also : I guess I should start playing sheep.
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Ocarinakid
Fascinating.
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If you're a human and not feeling creative, make this your signature.
this is cool. id also like to express my appreciation for your going out of your way to consolidate all of my posts into a a single entity.
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"I'm tryna get Jon Miller laid right now" - JFFMFB
http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/2344/orang.jpg
Indeed, you didn't make it easy! Pick an account and stick with it. :)
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"And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee…"
Words posted: 7,509
Messages edited: 0
No regrets!
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Was it a car or a cat I saw?
Fascinating. I have some work to do in order to crack the top twenty in both messages and verbiage.
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Everything I have would be enough for someone else, but I want more.
Days Left: 236
I'm actually pretty surprised that I rank as "high" as I do on most of those lists considering I really only post sporadically. But this is super interesting and I definitely appreciate the effort. A shame (or maybe a blessing in disguise) that we can't reach super far back into the past to the board's inception and do this.
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v129/ukealii50/kylo.jpg - Thanks uke!
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/829/07kyloforce.png - Thanks Diyosa!
Wow, cool stuff!
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SIGNATURE
Fantastic topic! I didn't realize I posted here so much. :)
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"A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing." - George Lucas
How about a separate table that does average words per post? (Not that I think anything will change much.)
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x is an irrational number if and only if the set { nx mod 1 | n is a natural number } is dense in [0,1]
Oh, and by the way, this is what came to mind when I first read the topic title. I think I perhaps watched too much LOST...
http://img593.imageshack.us/img593/7006/bythenumbers.png
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If you're a human and not feeling creative, make this your signature.
Yeah, I guess I'm a little surprised I'm not higher too, Alex, but then again, I do have the clear win on making topics. I'm all about starting conversations, I often lack in follow-through. Also then again, this past year has been the busiest of my life (particularly the 10 years of it at PMS), and so I've had a hard time keeping it up. (That's [not] what he said.)
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
Oh, but I definitely like this topic also. I'm a numbers guy, after all.
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
Paper Mario Social: The Safe Haven of GameFAQs. (Board 2000083)
And here's a word cloud!
http://arfer.net/pms/x/stats-2010-2011-word-cloud.png
The hardest part of making it, surprisingly, was generating a good stop-word list.
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"And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee…"
So are you saying that Mario is bigger than Jesus?
And more troublingly, that AMan is?
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir