by CIDU Bill

An Interesting Number

Fluffy Bunny Slippers’s comment in the “Speaking of ‘Operation’…” post was the 40,000th comment since the site was resurrected just under two years ago (coming in the 2050th post).

Oddly enough, as far as I can tell, not one of those comments came from a Samoan.

25 Comments

  1. For the record, this number doesn’t include spam or any other comment that’s been removed from the site.

    And I would have waited and mentioned the 50,000th instead, but I just happened to notice this and I doubt I’ll be paying any attention when 50,000 rolls around.

  2. Congratulations, FBS! I’m a little disappointed I missed the mark, but still, I was 39,998th, so I’m pretty pleased overall.

  4. @ Bill – As far as random (or meaningless) CIDU statistics are concerned:

    “We Want Samoa!”

    P.S. That principle also applies to OY-Posts and other hideous puns.

  5. My takeaway is “an average of 20 comments per post, with no spam or racist comments”, which is an Internet rarity.

  6. huh. I just looked up the number of comments I have captured on my archive, and it is only 39,313. I somehow managed to not scape some 700 comments… Seems like a lot. I did have a couple of outages, and I can’t capture comments that spend so much time in moderation they don’t make the latest 10 comments list — but still, ~700?

  8. larK, I can easily believe that: we’re taking about 1 comment in 45. As quick as I try to be rescuing comments from Moderation, new comments come quickly enough that I probably rescue very few before 10 new ones have been posted.

  11. Yeah, now that I think about it, I guess you’re right. The two or three weekend outages I had could easily account for at least half that, and then there’s the moderation trap…

  12. @ Bill & Lark – The “Most Recent Comments” list actually offers 15 (and not just 10) comments, but that might be a helpful solution for the problem of “non-scraped” comments: can you increase the number of comments on that list to 20? I’ve never really used the “Most Recent Posts” menu, so I wouldn’t miss it if it was driven deeper.

  13. Huh. I can’t get the recent comments tab to work at all on the site, so I can’t confirm how many recent comments are on offer; either way, I use the rss feed to scrape, because it’s a nice small page, so neither Bill nor I should mind my hitting it every ten minutes. The rss page ( https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/comments/feed/ ) only has ten comments. Anyone familiar with wordpress know if maybe there’s a parameter I can put in the URL to have it display more?

  14. Kilby, I’ll see whether I can change it to 20. It seems like every time I go into the Dashboard to make a change, there’s one more thing that’s no longer changeable.

    I have no idea what WordPress thinks is gained by this.

  16. An average of 20 comments per post surprised me as well, but a quick scan told me it’s reasonable. Over the past week alone, the comment count has ranged from a low of 1 to a high of 72.

  17. Okay, regarding the increase in the number of “Recent Comments” in the sidebar: the good news is, this IS something WordPress still allows me to customize; the bad news is, the limit is 15.

  18. Geeze, can’t you guys just let Fluffy Bunny Slippers have his/her moment in the sun? Enough nit-picking already. If Bill says it’s 40,000, then that’s good enough for me. FBS will feel like this is a totally illegitimate accolade if this carries on Samoa.

  23. SingaporeBill – I have always preferred the Thin Mint Girl scout cookies. 🙂

    Sorry could not resist as it is Girl Scout cookie season.

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