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Top 50 Posters Extrapolated, July 2017

Doctor Q said:
Here's another list for your amusement.

Users with at least 10,000 posts and at least 1,000 likes

Code: 
Rank  10000/1000 Club   No. Likes
----  ----------------  ---------
 1    Scepticalscribe     17,262
 2    maflynn             14,003
 3    samcraig            12,808
 4    C DM                10,007
 5    Apple fanboy         9,855
 6    Rogifan              9,193
 7    rdowns               9,069
 8    Relentless Power     8,519
 9    NT1440               7,790
10    MRU                  7,710
11    MH01                 6,879
12    Huntn                6,840
13    eyoungren            6,614
14    Newtons Apple        6,288
15    Eraserhead           5,087
16    SandboxGeneral       4,834
17    Applejuiced          4,747
18    Chupa Chupa          4,645
19    MacNut               4,338
20    Weaselboy            4,281
21    The Game 161         3,981
22    OllyW                3,935
23    kdarling             3,836
24    ucfgrad93            3,766
25    Night Spring         2,763
26    I7guy                2,677
27    lordofthereef        2,637
28    JayLenochiniMac      2,336
29    Dagless              2,305
30    AidenShaw            2,251
31    mattopotamus         2,047
32    KPOM                 1,973
33    cube                 1,904
34    Peace                1,902
35    gnasher729           1,898
36    tiggger              1,805
37    skunk                1,618
38    yg17                 1,589
39    annk                 1,381
40    Lord Blackadder      1,262
41    Doctor Q             1,217
42    nagromme             1,175
43    rhett7660            1,024
44    aristobrat           1,008

Because many of these users' posts were made before the Like system was available, I don't compute the ratio of likes to posts. That measure would artificially favor more recent forum members.
Click to expand...

Whoohooo... I made a list!!!!!!

@Doctor Q thanks for putting these lists together, it is always pretty cool to see and read!
 
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jkcerda said:
well, I tend to either show my legs or make polls that send me to hell on my threads so posters either like my short/fat/hairy legs or they like the idea of sending me to hell :D
Click to expand...
See, another like! I just contributed to your total! LOL!
 
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Scepticalscribe said:
How do you decide what it is you wish to measure?
Click to expand...
The traditional goal is to produce Chart #1, Chart #2, and Chart #3. I added Chart #4 based on an excellent suggestion. The rest is just curiosity, so what I look at varies from year to year.

One complication for the data gathering is that users occasionally change names. I look up profile information based on user numbers, then adjust the past data if I find that a name no longer matches, so I don't mistakenly treat them as two separate forum members. I manually exclude the bots named Macrumors and MacBytes. They used to sneak into the raw lists because they had lots of posts, but they aren't real users. The same for user DailyTunes, which some of you might remember.

I used to worry that publishing these lists would encourage forum spamming, but I haven't seen evidence that anyone is making useless posts in an effort to make the Top 50. People with high levels of participation are interested in the discussions, want to express their opinions, want to help other users, and/or have plenty of time for MacRumors.
 
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eyoungren said:
See, another like! I just contributed to your total! LOL!
Click to expand...
if PRSI post counted I would make the top 50 list ..........

hell I got a feeling I would be #1 in top wasteland post :p
19679260_1645014338875258_7574253413061130898_o.jpg
 
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Doctor Q said:
I used to worry that publishing these lists would encourage forum spamming, but I haven't seen evidence that anyone is making useless posts in an effort to make the Top 50. People with high levels of participation are interested in the discussions, want to express their opinions, want to help other users, and/or have plenty of time for MacRumors.
Click to expand...
I don't think that's a concern.

The users with the most posts are so far ahead that to even come remotely close there would have to be a concerted spamming effort that would get noticed rather quickly.

For myself, I strive to post more, but I don't spam. There's no point in it. The difference between me and the top poster is around 27K posts. So, I engage more and try to explore more parts of the forums than I am normally in. That also leads to discussions I've not ever been a part of before so it can be interesting.

That results in a win/win I believe.
 
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Doctor Q said:
I use curl to collect raw data, but there's more to do, starting with deciding which users to collect data for. But in theory others could do this too. I probably use my administrator status to collect certain details, but I think that the primary task could be done by others: find users with lots of posts and/or high post rates, project totals 6 months into the future, and compile the various lists.
Click to expand...
Is "find users with lots of posts" a manual operation? Because that would be tedious and time-consuming.

Or is there a scrapeable page that serves as a starting point for this adventure?
 
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jkcerda said:
if PRSI post counted I would make the top 50 list ..........
Click to expand...
Somebody with lots of time to kill could collect and analyze data from the "Areas" sections in user profiles and uncover all sorts of facts and trends, including top poster lists that include PRSI. That information wasn't available under vBulletin, but is under Xenforo.

A bot could even do searches, user by user, to look for more posting trends. I wonder how easy or hard it would be to write code to identify each user's political leanings, based on their post content, so we could create pie charts to count liberals versus conservatives or the people on either side of a controversial issue. One key would be to ignore the portions of posts that are quotes, so for example this user wouldn't be counted as a lemur supporter:

Posted by BanAllAnimals:
LemurLover said:
Lemurs are the greatest animal of all! Some of my best friends are lemurs.
Click to expand...
No way. They're sneaky and not to be trusted. One stole my wallet and my car.​
 
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jkcerda said:
if PRSI post counted I would make the top 50 list ..........

hell I got a feeling I would be #1 in top wasteland post :p
19679260_1645014338875258_7574253413061130898_o.jpg
Click to expand...

Now, that is actually very funny.

I laughed aloud reading it.

eyoungren said:
I don't think that's a concern.

The users with the most posts are so far ahead that to even come remotely close there would have to be a concerted spamming effort that would get noticed rather quickly.

For myself, I strive to post more, but I don't spam. There's no point in it. The difference between me and the top poster is around 27K posts. So, I engage more and try to explore more parts of the forums than I am normally in. That also leads to discussions I've not ever been a part of before so it can be interesting.

That results in a win/win I believe.
Click to expand...

Agreed.

Doctor Q said:
Not these days, but in 2003 it took only 1359 total posts to make the Top 50. At current post rates, Relentless Power or C DM could have made that list in less than 2 months, starting from 0.
Click to expand...

Yes, but the number of posts made by posters - even the prolific ones, as I can attest from personal experience - varies considerably over time, as circumstances change; personal and professional elements of our lives demand attention, for example, priorities change, new jobs and/or new relationships may lead a poster to adopt strikingly different posting habits.
 
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chown33 said:
Is "find users with lots of posts" a manual operation? Because that would be tedious and time-consuming.

Or is there a scrapeable page that serves as a starting point for this adventure?
Click to expand...
I start with the previous year's list of tracked users, currently over 400 users. To that list I add any other users with at least 5000 posts, which tends to add fewer than 25 new "trackees" each time. I used to rely on vBulletin's public Member List, sorted by post count, to find them. Under Xenforo you can see the Top 20 here but there isn't a public version of the complete member list. However, I bet that the "staff" would be willing to provide a list of users with 5000 or more posts, twice a year on request, if somebody wanted to process it.

I've used 5000 as the arbitrary cutoff because that usually lets me track users who are approaching the Top 50 long before they get there. But, as we've seen, sometimes users sneak up by surprise.
 
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