I'm nearly just 1,000 posts behind Matthew from being the all-time high poster.

I am a programmer by trade, so I'm thinking of writing a bot that would log in as me and then make about 100 recipe posts per day on the infamous "What's for Dinner" thread that gave poche about 95% of his post total.

But then Matthew is also a programmer, so he could write a bot to beat my post total by exactly one each day so that I'd never catch up.

Strangely, I can't find that thread.  So perhaps Matthew is a step ahead of me.

I haven't deleted that thread, because I've deleted enough nonsense threads.

Most Trad forums don't delete such threads, so I don't want CathInfo to have an artificially low post count, given its actual traffic, popularity, and posting activity. People like to make simple, apples to apples comparisons.

It's bad enough I deleted a couple thousand members back when my hosting resources were much, much lower -- I was trying to squeeze every ounce of efficiency I could out of the software, to postpone the inevitable of having to upgrade my web hosting. But again, no other Trad forums have done this. So to compare apples to apples, you need to look at the ID of the newest member (#7410 as I write this), instead of just the number of members reported on the homepage. In fact, that's doubly low because that number also excludes all banned members! I know that no other software does this (the old CI software, for example).

But for the most accurate gauge of popularity, one should look at the # of posts per day, or the # of members logged in at various points in the day. Otherwise, a forum could be resting on its laurels, coasting off its high school football glory days, as it were, even though it's a washed-up obese 40 year old man sitting in front of the TV today.

A thought exercise for you: imagine if today, everyone left Facebook. I mean 99.9% of the users. They all went to a new social media site, let's call it "CatholicBook". Say there was a restoration, with mass conversions. Set aside the details for now. How long would it take for this new site (CatholicBook), now with a sudden influx of millions of users, posting 10s of millions of posts per day, to catch up to Facebook's total # of posts? It would take *years*. Also imagine that you can't delete your account (which is the case with almost all forums I've ever been to). So FB could continue to report tens of millions of users, even though its daily traffic has suddenly gone down 99.9%, and they are, objectively speaking, now irrelevant. But they could coast off their former glory for a long time, proudly displaying their total # of registered users, # of posts, etc.