Where did my number of Posts go?

[RiversideGuy]

Just noticed that I had several thousand posts listed in my panel (think it was over 5k)... a LOT of which I did several years back (2015-2016). BUT the ~5k kept showing in the past year since I returned to the game. So NOW I see I have only 317, something like that. How come? Not a HUGE deal, just curious.

[Enkidoh]

Were they in threads that were deleted? And not just threads that the GMs thought were spam or flamefests either - there were some very popular and legitimate threads dating back to ARR's launch years ago that had become so bogged down they were breaking the forum and had to be deleted also.

This is due to a notorious bug with VBulletin, the proprietary software that this forum runs on (a bug I've experienced personally as a mod on another forum that also used VBulletin) - extremely large threads over several thousands of pages can cause the whole forum server to become unstable and suffer constant crashes and worse, and the only way to deal with it is to prune said thread of posts, usually the oldest and most irrelevant.

SE went the other way and just deleted the threads wholesale and asked players to create new ones on the same subject - "Tales From the Duty Finder" in General Discussion springs to mind.

It's unfortunate, but it's the only thing I can think of that could have caused your post count to decline so much.

[RiversideGuy]

Interesting, thanks for responding. Kinda sure threads I posted in were pretty neutral compared to flamefests. Just remember that my number held steady until a few weeks ago, then boom!

Besides I got major/bigger beefs w/SE.