Stats

Post Reply New Topic

There is a simple way to achieve this effect.

If the stats you are talking about seem reasonably interesting to the members,
and you can come up with a very simple way for them to do the change,
and you don't expect to update more than once a month,
you just might manage to get a moderator to finalise it.

Personally, I'm in favour of the edit limit being far lower - certainly less than one hour. That's enough time to spot and correct some spelling errors, and such like. Beyond that point, I always feel you should leave your posts alone. People will not see any changes you make, plus you will confuse them. If you wish to alert them to something you said wrong, another post works infinitely better.

Anyway, back to the subject. I can see a fairly reasonable way of doing this.

Just republish the stats as a new post at the end of the thread, occasionally. If the initial post doesn't contain any stats at all, but just tells the viewer that they can find a summary by scanning backwards from the end of the thread, then nothing more is required.

This has the advantage that, if someone has the thread "watched", they get to see when you update.

Now, if (as I said up above) you can get a mod interested, they could occasionally be persuaded to change a link in the first post, to point to the latest summary stats post. Actually, I doubt that you'll have too much luck, here, as what I've described above (scanning back from the end of the thread) seems pretty workable, and never goes "out-of-date".

Also, if you record the stats carefully, you need only look at the posts between the last summary and the current point, to work out the new set. What I would do here is...

1. Decide to do an update...
2. Post a new reply that says "Updated summary being calculated - please check back later"...
3. Yank your data from the posts between the last summary and your marker...
4. "Reply" to the old summary, which will give you an easy copy/paste from inside the quote tags...
5. Scrap that "Reply" and instead "Edit" your marker post...
6. Overwrite the temporary message with the old stats...
7. Update with your new values...
8. Submit.

The point of making the post have the temporary message is that it ensures you don't get caught out by someone happening to post while you are trying to do your thing.

You could just do an update, ignoring that possibility, but taking a careful note of exactly which post was the last you included in your stats. If someone had snuck in a post (or several had!), you would need to quickly incorporate those, and edit the stats.

Hm. One last, even more devious, way to avoid even a single edit: Same as above, take a note of the post number for the last user post that you will be factoring into your stats. Make that post number part of your updated summary. It really is only meaningful to you. If people do make more posts while you calculate and format the stats, it doesn't matter. Your summary says "Summary up to [url=xxx<post number>]here[/url]". The fact that that post number might not be the immediately preceding post in the thread is no problem. They just missed the boat. You'll pick it/those up next time you do a summary.

I quite like that last scheme. Elegant. No rush. When you post the stats, watchers get to read them straight off. They are always accurate. If someone follows the "here" link, 99.9% of the time it will be the preceding post.

============

As I still have a gargantuan cold... much of the above may be rubbish.

However, if it sounds like a system that you could live with, and, if you'd like some assistance to switch a thread over to the idea, say so.

NB. "stats" does not mean lists of usernames - it means statistics.