The Stats Don't Add Up

[Luv2play]

I was just checking on two frequent posters, namely myself and Lucky. Lucky has over 11,000 posts to his credit, I have just short of 3000. I joined in June 2002 and Lucky was a charter member I believe which puts him back to when, 1998/99? My stats show I post just over 1 per day and Lucky 0.7 per day apprx. But even if Lucky has been a member 4 years longer than me, his number of posts would put him well above 1 per day, more like 3 per day. So what gives with the stats? Or are they just like Mark Twain opined?

[doitb4ugo]

Maybe

 

Could it be that Lucky's join date is listed as 12/31/1969.

[+ deej]

Sounds to me like a classic "off by one" programming problem.

 

But since I have no clue where you're looking we'll just leave that as the assumption.

[+ deej]

A little bird suggested you're looking at the statistics in the user profile. I'd never looked there.

 

It lists Lucky's (and my) "join date" as 12/31/1969. That's a default date assigned when no date is known.

 

Truth be told, an old version of the old board software didn't have join dates before a certain time (which is where "charter member" came from), and it got mangled in varying ways over several updates. The conversion to this software handled what it was given to handle which wasn't much.

 

So a join date in 1969 means a member for 41 years.

41 * 365 is 14965 days.

11587 posts in 14965 days is 0.77 per day.

 

The start date is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out. (Yes I've waited years to say that about Lucky. )

 

But the statistic is oddly correct.

[+ Charlie]

My own profile stats indicate that I have 0.22 posts per day, but I, too, am a "charter member" whose start date is listed as Dec. 1969, and that stat would be correct if I had really been a member for that many days. However, my own records show that I became a member on Sep. 24, 1999, so the correct number of posts should probably be approximately 0.85 per day. Since Lucky has more than three times as many posts as I do, his correct number must be at least 3.0 per day, so Luv2play's estimate is close to correct.

[+ deej]

See? Statistics can be completely accurate and absolutely wrong all at once.

 

LOL