What's the most active thread over different periods of time?

Same here! Jeez, really puts the age of this site into perspective, I’ve barely scratched the IF games surface, this year im diving straight in! Gotta play a lot and learn a lot! Here’s to an IF filled year lol

stop it… you lil bean

I’m reminded of the infamous Smacking Thread over on the ADRIFT forum, in which forum members smacked each other for months and months like a never-ending Three Stooges sketch. It was all in good fun but the mods did close it eventually. It’s probably still the longest thread on the ADRIFT forum, running to 1,831 posts.

Babies! I’m surrounded by babies!

(I would have been a ripe old 14)

If anyone hasn’t replied to this poll yet, feel free:

Poll: When did you play IF for the first time?

To me, this forum will always be the newfangled replacement for the Usenet newsgroups.*

* I personally think it’s much better than those were!

2006 is very impressive! When did the forum start?

Anyways, Introducing Ourselves has 1179 posts, which gives it ~.2 posts/day, making an extremely venerable but relaxed thread. Looking at Top => All Time, a promising candidate seems to be the Inform 7 open-source thread, which has 287 posts from April 28 to Sep 6, giving it, (using ~5 months as the time estimation) ~2 posts/day.

This thread, IFC entries get drawn, starts on the 1st of October and ends on the 31st with 129 posts, doing the best out of the above at ~4.2 posts/day!

Actually, I’m a little surprised, the Top tab doesn’t seem to be reflecting absolute replies, absolute views, or replies over time - it’s pretty opaque. I wonder how it’s calculated?

For example, my Top → All Time tab looks like this when I search for the positive/neutral thing thread:

ordering1644×850 172 KB

which doesn’t really seem to clearly be doing views or replies.

Per https://nickm.com/if/faq.html - the community started to coalesce on Newsgroups. I remember having newsgroup software before everything became web pages.

• rec.art.int-fiction, the Usenet newsgroup known as “raif” and devoted to discussing of authoring interactive fiction. The right place to discuss programming, craft, and theory. raif on Google Groups , raif FAQ , “past raif topics” on ifwiki
• rec.games.int-fiction, the Usenet newsgroup known as “rgif” and devoted to playing games. Annoucements of new games, requests for hints, and reviews go here. rgif on Google Groups
• r*if is a term used to refer to both raif and rgif.
• ifMUD , a MUD where members of the IF community hang out and chat.

RAIF FAQ

Unless I’m missing some history, the intfiction forums were initially on phpBB software as early as 2006 when the “Introducing Ourselves” thread started.

We switched over in 2019 to Discourse after discussion that seems to have begun in 2016. One requirement for the change was Discourse had to import all the data from phpBB so we wouldn’t lose it and that’s why we have the “introducing ourselves” thread that has lasted so long. It didn’t actually begin here!

Here’s the earliest Wayback snapshot I can find.

In total there are 2 users online :: 1 registered, 0 hidden and 1 guest
Most users ever online was 65 on Mon Jul 16, 2007 5:31 pm

I believe “Top” figures in post likes from Discourse which either wasn’t a phpBB feature, or it was and the stats didn’t translate in the migration.

I keep telling people: You’re not old until you reach 70 years.

And for any forum users at or above that age, you’re not even that old until you hit 100.

Frankly, every year that I still get to wake up is a victory. I’m approaching 30, but I’m excited to see if I make it to 60+, and what life will be like. Even if my eyes strain and my back aches more than it does now, and I get a whole lot of other problems, it’s still exciting.

There’s so much information I have yet to gather! My own pain is still interesting data, just like my victories and dreams!

I’m absolutely making use of my years before those problems kick in, of course, but I would never say that aging worries me!

To be fair, at least for me it’s less a fear of getting old and more getting slapped in the face by the awareness of time. Just like - oh god, that was that long ago? Ten years seems like nothing now? WEIRD! (Someone once told me at an internship that “[they] had socks older than [me]”, which I think about a lot.)

Also, for all of you young’uns - being 30 is awesome, idk why people worry about it so much. So far it’s way better than my 20s.

Even more for me to look forward to!!

I had an amusing conversation with one of my cousin’s kids when she was about 11 trying to explain that phones before touch-tone had rotary manual dials and she did not believe me.
“So, did it take like a half an hour to dial 911?”
“We didn’t have 9-”
“Well, then how would you press one for English huh?”

This seems to be the explanation how the top topics are determined: How are "Top" Topics Calculated? - users - Discourse Meta

I don’t think I have socks that old, as I don’t buy them often enough and tend to wear through them, but I certainly still have t-shirts and books I’ve purchased new as an adult that are older than some folks in attendance.

My son has a first 100 words book that uses a picture of a rotary phone to illustrate the word telephone, and I swear every time we get to that one he shoots me a look as if to say I’m only fifteen months old but I wasn’t born yesterday, exactly what are you trying to pull here daddy.

EDIT: and yeah, my 30s were way better than my 20s too! The pattern mostly holds true now that I’m in my 40s too, though I have to admit that there are some small bits of physical and mental decline that aren’t awesome - albeit much of that is probably just the toll of trying to keep up with said 15-month-old.

Check the dates too.

That’s two and a half years of smacking!

I don’t know, some would say New Year’s is the spookiest time of the year.

The 50s are an exciting age, because you get to have another adolescence, one no one prepared you for and that is every bit as hormonally and physically weird as the first one. Every day, you look at a part of your body and think, that can’t be mine. My hand/face/leg/stomach/knee doesn’t look like that.

Every day a new and exciting surprise.