The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #78741 Message #2251135
Posted By: JohnInKansas
01-Feb-08 - 10:02 PM
Thread Name: Who's Posted the Most?
Subject: RE: Who's Posted the Most?
We've had terrible battles about who's killed the most threads. A question like "who's started the most" is almost certain to cause similar arguments, even though it's less ambiguous than the debate about the other end.
There is (one hopes) always a first post in every thread, while it's never quite possible to be sure a thread has been properly and decently killed because someone might come along and post to it again.
Only a clone can "officially terminate" a thread, and even then they, or another clone, might bring it back to life.
It should be quite simple to construct a data set suitable for counting how many threads each person has started.
A list of all the "individual posts" needs to be made, but only the "headers" are really needed. The list must then be sorted, possibly alphabetically.
All threads that come after the first one in a thread start with a "Re: <thread title>" so deleting all the individual post headers that begin with "Re:" would leave only a list of "first posts."
Since the second line of each header consists of "From: <poster's name>, inserting a tab or other separator ahead of "From:" (replacing the linebreak) would allow conversion to a Table which could be sorted on the second column (which would include submittor's name) and all those with the same name as for the preceding one could be incremented by one, restarting the numbering at 1 each time the name changed.
A sort using the number column (after fixing formula results to values) then would bring the highest number to one end or the other, instantly revealing who had started the most threads.
It's elementary, of course; but one needs the entire threads database all in one place to actually do it.
John