Repeat Post: Why posts counts suddenly go down
Its' been brought to my attention that some have questions about why their post counts suddenly appear to reduce.
The explanation is below. This in order to keep the database running efficiently, I routinely run utilities that perforem various data integrety checks. The utility does not play favorites or specifically targets anyone. Furthermore, I can't directly alter someones post count even if I wanted to. Sure, staff can delete posts, but there is no way for us to hack off 300 posts for a given user.
The post count system is integrated with the reputation system, so if your post count changes, it can also change your rep score. It's not a big deal. The system works well, and if maintained, provides us with a unique scoring system, different from most other online communities.
Usually once or twice a month, I run a job that cleans up the reputation indexes and post counts.
For those who pay close attention to your reputation and post counts, you may notice a change in your values. This is because the cleanup job verifies every post of every thread to see if it is infact valid, and updates the indexes for each user. It's an important job to run as it keeps the database lean and free of orphaned data.
Say a post you made was removed. The system doesn't always immediately update your post count. It's more complex than this, but I am simplifying it for the purposes of explanation. Now multiply this act by several hundred accounts; this would overwhelm the application server and crash the board. My cleanup job takes care of those 'incremental updates'.
Just keeping you informed...
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Last edited by DBlack : July 19th, 2005 at 09:11 AM.
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