Thu, April 5, 2007
Who's Who—1:32 AM
We still get a lot of comment spam at onebee. On the order of 500 posts a day, roughly. (Fortunately, nearly 100% of these are eradicated before they even get saved in the database.)
I was poking around the comments database today, doing a little "defragging." Before the lastest spam-blocking efforts were enacted, many posts were stored in the database. They were quickly deleted, but they left large gaps in the sequence of comment IDs. We have somewhere around 2,000 comments, but the comment IDs were up in the 11,300 range because of all the big gaps in the counting that were left by deleted spam comments. The only reason to clear out those gaps is that the comment ID field in the database is currently set up to store numbers only 10 digits long or shorter; you don't want to use bigger ID numbers than you have to. Sure, we only have around 2,000 comments today, and it's a long way to 1 billion – but we're in it for the long haul. At the current rate (assuming no increase in comment frequency – which is laughable because in the future we'll have robots to do housework, freeing up valuable time for posting onebee comments), we'll hit our billionth comment by September of the year 1245785. Might as well be ready!
While I was cleaning up, I decided to run some numbers on our current comments and where they come from. Happily, most of them (64.8%) come from members who are logged in. Yay, logins! The other 35.2% come from anonymous posters (though most of these identify themselves by typing in a name, and most of those are people like Holly, Mike, Christi, and – in the early days – Andy; far from "anonymous"). Anyway, here's the breakdown:
"KOTC" — Thu, 4/12/07 11:24pm
Surely (and I hope you don't mind that I call you that), I'm good for a percentage point... or two.
Bee Boy — Fri, 4/13/07 12:29pm
A whopping three percentage points, in fact! Of the red pie wedge ("semi-cowards"), here's the breakdown:
Holly 18%
Mike 14%
KOTC 11%
Andy 10%
Alicia 4%
Christi 3%
Erica 2%
(and the rest) 39%
The top four people on this list provided 52% of these comments; of those, all but one have login accounts. Many (if not most) of their comments were posted in the green "members" section of the pie chart. These are just the ones from before they had a login or times they didn't feel like using it.
The more important race is who can take the longest break between comments. Here, KOTC places sixth, having taken off 303 days, 13 hours, 57 minutes, and 20 seconds between 6/13/06 and yesterday. (In the top five, no one else has posted more than 14 comments, making KOTC the most estranged among the power-commenters. Mark holds the all-time record, over 722 days, but he's only posted 3 comments overall. There were times I thought Mark and KOTC were the same person, but these days I doubt it.)
Bee Boy — Fri, 5/18/07 7:23pm
Another alarming statistic for those who are interested (i.e., me):
A whopping 2.8% of all onebee comments are devoted to the pressing issue of Tom Cavanagh and the long-defunct Love Monkey.
Also, "Tom Cavanagh and the Long-Defunct Love Monkey" would be a great name for a band.