Those numbers I was running

[yayfulness]

While proofreading lately, I've noticed the inbox has been rather sparse. I'd been meaning to look into it for a while, and because reasons, today seemed like a good day to get it done.

Methodology: I sampled every question divisible by 200, counting backwards from 88400 until I reached 40000 (I could have gone back almost 10,000 more before hitting the Great Archives Interruption, but I didn't) and recording the date the question was published. If the question was obviously published out of order (for instance, if 73400 was published after 73600), or if the question was rejected rather than published, I sampled the next question instead. This still leaves a lot of room in the micro scale for error, since there's no easy way to account for how many questions were held significantly over 100 hours that doesn't involve me doing extra work, but on the macro scale it paints what I can only assume is a reasonably accurate picture. To deal with that fluctuation, I then applied a smoothing function before graphing the results.

Here's what I came up with:

for science.png (77.14 KiB) Viewed 31421 times

Keep in mind that the X axis measures question number and the Y axis measures time. Also, because I was lazy, the graph is best read right-to-left rather than left-to-right.

The X axis labels are, as far as I can tell, cell numbers. To give you an idea of the timeline, here are the months and years from a few of them:

1 - November 2016
11 - May 2016
21 - November 2015
31 - May 2015
41 - December 2014
51 - July 2014
61 - February 2014
71 - September 2013
81 - May 2013
91 - January 2013
101 - August 2012
111 - February 2012
121 - September 2011
131 - March 2011
141 - November 2010
151 - July 2010
161 - March 2010
171 - November 2009
181 - June 2009
191 - February 2009
201 - November 2008
211 - July 2008
221 - April 2008
231 - January 2008
241 - October 2007

Apart from proving that I am a huge nerd and that I either love procrastinating or hate doing homework, this shows a pretty clear decrease in the rate at which questions were asked. It's not constant - 2012 was apparently a really slow year - but the trend line shows an average increase from 10 days per 200 questions to around 18 days per 200 questions between late 2007 and late 2016.

There's a very small part of me that has always wanted to teach myself programming just so I could become webmaster just so I could have access to all of the Board's internal data.