I like statistics, and I know that some of you like them, too. For this project, I thought it would be fun to include some facts and figures about our posting activities. With so many posts, it's hard to wrap your head around everything that happened. Hopefully these statistics will make it a bit easier to digest the huge volume of messages.

For the statistics to be meaningful, you'll need to understand what is being measured and how it was measured. For this reason, I'm providing these notes to help explain certain problems with the data and how I approached them. It may also give you some insight into the effort that went into the creation of this archive.

Dates and Times

Most of the times you see have been changed to the Central Time Zone and properly adjusted for Daylight Saving Time. The notable exceptions to this are the times you see in quote headers and in "edited by" tags within a post. These times were embedded in the post when it was written and were based on the settings the author used for his or her time zone.

Let's look at an example that illustrates the difference. Check out this post from thelawnwrangler. The message was posted at 1:25 AM Central Time. However, during those days, thelawnwrangler was unfortunately spending his days in the Eastern Time Zone. When he quotes mindylieu's message, which was posted at 3:16 PM Central Time, it was quoted as 4:16 PM since thelawnwrangler's settings were for the Eastern Time Zone. You will also note that the message was edited at 2:26 AM. Because this time was also dependent on thelawnwrangler's time zone setting, we can determine that it was edited at 1:26 AM Central Time, which was one minute after it was posted.

Approximately 80% of the message board members who posted messages had their time set for the Central Time Zone so, in most cases, the times you see listed here match the author's local time. The only impact a discrepancy has on the statistics is when we look at things like posts per day. If a member posted a message at 12:30 AM Eastern Time on a Saturday, it would be counted in the statistics for the preceding Friday since it would have been 11:30 PM in the Central Time Zone.

Posting Days

The message board's first post was on Monday, November 26, 2001, and the last surviving post was made on Tuesday, January 9, 2007. That spans 1,871 days on the calendar. However, the Features Message Board was not on-line for that whole time. It was off-line for two days on July 2 and 3, 2002. It was also taken off-line during The Great Blackout from May 10 through September 18, 2006. When we discount the 134 days for these two outages, we are left with 1,737 days that the message board was on-line and available for posting. I refer to this as the number of "posting days," and it's the number that I use in my calculations.

Surviving Posts

I'm proud to say that this archive is almost 100% complete. It includes items that were once very difficult to access, such as the posts from elliott and the topic in which matt mahaffey makes an appearance. Unfortunately, though, it's not entirely complete; there are some posts missing. A few posts have mysteriously disappeared, and some were deleted by the board's moderators. I refer to the 72,187 posts that we still have as the "surviving posts." Since I can't count what I don't have, all of the statistics in this archive are based on the number of surviving posts.

So what's missing? It's impossible for us to know for sure. However, with a little knowledge of the message board's history and some technical detective work, we can get a rough idea. The technical data can get pretty detailed, though. If you don't care about this sort of thing, feel free to skip to the next section. Just remember the key point of this section: All statistics are based on the surviving posts.

Before the Features Message Board was opened to the general public, it went through a test period in which only certain friends of the band were allowed to preview the web site. Records seem to indicate that during this time, the message board had eight members and that they posted 25 messages. However, before the site was opened to the public, these test messages were erased. They have never resurfaced nor were they ever available on the Features Message Board after it opened. They are not available in this archive either.

When the Features Message Board was first launched, it was powered by Ikonboard version 2.1. Unfortunately, this software was a little bit buggy. In some cases, posts simply disappeared. For example, neuboy once indicated that one of his posts vanished. In a more famous case, Keith claimed that a post he made in the infamous "lurve" topic also disappeared. If these posts were in fact lost by the Ikonboard software, we have no record of them today, and the missing posts are not in this archive. Because the old message board software kept no system logs, we have no clues to indicate how many posts may be missing. However, I suspect it is very few.

In July, 2002, the Ikonboard software finally collapsed under its own weight, and michael, the site's creator and heroic administrator, upgraded the software to Invision Board version 1.0. This new software was much more reliable. It also kept some system logs, which give us some clues about which posts are missing.

The new software gave each post its own ID number. The 6,573 posts that existed when the software was upgraded were assigned ID's 1 through 6573. Thereafter, each new message was assigned the next sequential number. These IDs are important because we can look for holes in the chain of numbers and determine which posts are missing and when they were posted.

The last surviving post has an ID of 73191 so, logically, we would expect to have 73,191 posts in the archive. However, we only have 72,187 posts, which indicates that we are missing 1,004 posts. According to the system logs, the message board moderators deleted 30 individual posts. They also deleted 850 whole topics. Most of the topics that were deleted were spam and would have only contained one post. Together, these deletions would account for 880 of the missing posts. Additionally we know that in some cases legitimate topics were inadvertently deleted. These topics would have certainly had more than one post each so we can assume that the posts in these legitimate topics probably account for the remaining 124 missing posts.

Finally, I will note that the last surviving post was posted on January 9, 2007 at 3:41 PM. However, some records indicate that at least two more posts were made after that. YaDaDaDa posted in the "Recording at Shows?" topic on January 10, 2007, at 12:42 PM, and hzcvjcpd posted what was most certainly the message board's last spam topic on January 10, 2007 at 3:14 PM. For some unknown reason, neither of these posts has survived.

Guest Posts

During a few periods of time, most notably after the software upgrade in July, 2002, people were allowed to post as a guest on the message board without registering. There are 97 of these guest posts. More often than not, though, these posts were made by members who forgot to log in, not anonymous visitors. For many of these posts, the member who posted the message would immediately realize his error, log in properly, and claim the previous post as his own. In these cases, I've matched the guest posts with the original author. Of course, by reuniting these posts with their original authors, some members' posting statistics have increased slightly.

Traditional Numbers

In both the Ikonboard and Invision Board software systems, the posting statistics were not dynamically calculated. Instead, to achieve better performance, the programmers of those systems chose to store the post counts in the database. So, for example, whenever you were viewing the message board and you saw that Keith had 2,104 posts, the software had simply pulled this number out of Keith's user file; the system didn't actually go through all of the posts, counting all of the ones from Keith to make sure the number was correct. While this method allowed the software to operate more quickly, it also meant the numbers could get out of sync. Any little glitch in the software could keep the number from incrementing whenever a user posted a message. If a post was deleted, the author's post count was never decreased. It also made it possible for a mischievous moderator to tamper with a member's post count.

The message board software's statistics were inaccurate, but they were all we had at the time. We used these numbers to celebrate certain events and to honor members' accomplishments. In this archive, I refer to these as statistics as the "traditional numbers" since they were used as the basis of much of the message board's lore.

Unfortunately, the statistics that we traditionally used don't always match up with the statistics calculated for this archive. For example, brianeno2 was lauded for being the first member to reach Advanced Member status with his 250th post. However, six of the posts in his traditional post count were from the message board's Prehistoric Period. Since those posts didn't survive, they are not counted in the statistics for this archive, leaving him with only 246 posts in his posting career. Therefore, according to the new statistics, brianeno2 never reached Advanced Member status.

The entire purpose of this project is to celebrate the Features Message Board, not rewrite its history. The statistics provided in this archive are intended to help us understand the great volume of posts and gain new insights into our posting activity. They provide a new way of looking at our history, but in no way should they ever replace our grand traditions.

50 Posts Club

The Features Message Board had 2,102 registered members. Of these, only 777 members actually contributed a surviving post. Some of the statistics in this archive would be skewed by members who only posted one or two times. Therefore, to keep these stats meaningful, I require a member to have a minimum of 50 surviving posts to be included in these calculations. This ensures that we have an adequate sample of posting activity for measuring a member's performance. And, let's be honest with ourselves, if you're reading this archive, you're a hardcore fan of the message board. You want to see statistics of the members that you know without being distracted by minor members who only posted three or four times.

Member Titles

Although it has no impact on the statistics calculated for this archive, I would like to clarify a minor historical discrepancy in the Member Titles. When the message board was running the Ikonboard software, members were assigned the following ranks:

Rank	Required Number of Posts
Newbie	25
Junior Member	50
Member	100
Full Member	150
Advanced Member	250

After the message board was upgraded to use the Invision Board software, the titles and requirements changed:

Rank	Required Number of Posts
Newbie	0
Member	25
Advanced Member	60
Officially A Fan	100
Features Superstar	300

As you read the older posts, you may see some members mention these rankings. Using the guide above should help you understand these conversations within their historical contexts.