The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #78741 Message #2248401
Posted By: JohnInKansas
30-Jan-08 - 02:18 AM
Thread Name: Who's Posted the Most?
Subject: RE: BS: Who's Posted the Most?
On occasion I've regretted not tracing a couple of old posts that I had difficulty finding again. With our new DSL connection it now seemed possible, and in fact fairly reasonable, just to archive all the threads to which I've posted, so that I could have them all in one folder for quickly searching out my gems of wisdom when needed.
As I'm a relative newcomer, with the first post using my current identity on 15-Jul-01 - 09:25 PM, what seemed reasonable for me would, obviously, be rather a massive task for a few of our olden-timers.
My current tally, according to the search, is a paltry 7,962 posts in roughly 6 years. Having completed my archive, I find that I've posted to a mere 3,280 threads that, as .mht "web archive" files comprise about 513 MB.
Some, like Amos who has 39,157 posts, would find it a much more difficult thing to accomplish. Of course, if we had a "nonsense filter" he could apply that and only need to archive about 37 threads; but that probably requires an additional development of mudcat capabilities. By the time that gets done he might be up to a less manageable 40 or 50 threads after filtering. (He's been here a lot longer than I have.)
Posts for catspaw39 are at a relatively modest 23,147, but I seem to recall that there may have been a change of moniker some while back, so his actual personal total may be significantly more than that. It's fairly obvious that the nonsense filter would do little to reduce his archiving task, as there is very rarely anything but polite, concise, and erudite content in anything he posts.
Joe Offer shows a paltry 19,696 posts, but as his contain no (non)sense at all the filter wouldn't be much help. There's also the question of whether "edit posts" are included in the search, so his actual busyness on the site may be much more than indicated.
Recognizing that running quickly through opening a whole archive (opening lots of threads in quick succession) would perhaps burden mudcat's bandwidth, I did my best to do the archiving only when traffic seemed at a low ebb, and generally worked through about a "page" or two of the search results at any one session. As a result of this, it did take a few weeks to work through all threads to which I've posted.
Once the basic archiving was done, when I open a thread after posting to verify that all went well, (something that of course everyone does) it's fairly quick to archive that thread, or "thread segment," to keep the record current. (If opening a 50-post part of a thread it is necessary to add a "page number" to the save title, since otherwise the last page will overwrite previous ones.)
Reviewing my results, I do find perhaps a dozen or so of my own posts worth saving; but I was having trouble finding a couple of them since I couldn't recall the thread names correctly. I've also found that a few that I remembered as being "very good" actually weren't all that great. But nostalgia has a certain appeal.
As it's been a couple of years since this thread dropped out of sight, perhaps – in the absence of much intelligent discourse recently – a fresh round of comparing notes and a bit of new bragging is in order.
Maybe there's a new weiner.
John