Possible? Maybe not but worth a try?

[Silenteye]

Hey Adama After reading Druulempire's post on his 3000th post is it possible you could program the Addventure to keep track of how many posts we make directly after we post? By this I mean after we make a post the post that the number of the post appears next to our name? If someone else has asked this question before then I apologize but hey I'm just trying to think of ways making it easier for us writers to keep track of what we write...

[BEginner]

So you're thinking something like:

Silenteye [784]

Showing your total posts to date?

[Silenteye]

Yes!

[BEginner]

Adama's scripting and tools run monthly to calculate ep totals, so it may be hard to do this in real time.  It probably would have to have your total up to the end of the previous month.  Plus someone would have to 'do it', and that someone would have to comment on the accuracy of my statements, which I'm sure he'll do shortly

[DruulEmpire]

Eye, hi.  The only reason I know is because I keep scribbling my episode names and my total into a tiny notebook -- but the monthly stats already available in the index have always been fine by me.

Truth is, this can get a bit complicated.  There is for example a one episode discrepancy between my official total and the one that appears with my author graph.  Furthermore, I can recall at least one instance (which I've played mum about, till now) in which exactly the same episode with the same number has somehow appeared twice in my index list.  Over the years this Archive and particularly all attempts to contribute to its Addventure have persisted through all kinds of of strangeness, so absolute accuracy may be impossible.  That, in fact, is why I actually waited until episode #3,003 (by my scribbled account) before announcing my 3000.

The doability of this would almost certainly be up to Adama, who may well ask us "Yes, but will you use your newfound power for good or evil?"

V to BEginner below: another factor is whether or not Adama decides to disqualify any episodes.  This can happen particularly in what appears to be a "flame war," in which episodes get spent on commenting on the Addventure or specific participants or whatever.  I seem to recall -- perhaps wrongly -- once making a fairly calm and centrist episode/post, but Adama didn't want any such, period, so it got discredited.  So there's still some editorial jurisdiction going on. 

[BEginner]

Hah, yeah...in fact, I believe until recently Adama counted on his fingers and toes everyone's episodes and manually updated the author stats, so it's not surprising there may be some duplication in the counts once in a while.  It's all automated now, or mostly so...or at least so I believe, Adama may still use a toe or two in the monthly updates...

[Silenteye]

Hmm but wouldn't it be easier to just record the episodes signed by author's instead of all the posts?

[Adama]

For more detail than you'd ever want to know about how the Index stats are created, see http://www.bearchive.com/~addventure/game1/trees/howto.html.

DruulEmpire, the main reason why the totals might be different is that the counts on the main totals page have involved a lot of mental totaling of values, and over the years there are many chances for error to creep in.  The totals on the graphs pages are more likely to be accurate, since they are calculated off the contents of the individual Author pages.

I do have an ongoing project for improving production of Index pages, and I do have plans for going back to the beginning of the addventure (1998) and recalculating all totals from the beginning... I just need the time.

Silenteye, it's an interesting idea, but
a) not everyone is as consistent as you are about their signature, and I use a GUI utility app each month to figure out exactly which episodes were written by which authors, based on eyeballing their signatures.  I would need to figure out some simple parsing algorithm to do the same thing, so that it could run in real-time on episode creation.
b) Druul has a point about "disqualified" episodes (first time I've heard that term, I just call them "deleted").  Any time I delete an ep, I'd have to run some other utility app to recalculate the counts for all later episodes.

Druul, I just looked it up -- your "disqualified" episode (678011) was part of an OOC discussion thread, the sort of thing that belongs on the Forum (or nowadays in comments).  So the whole thread got removed.  There was nothing "wrong" with your ep other than it being part of a discussion thread.

[Lightfoot]

I've only really looked at the Addventure back when it started (and vaguely remember the starting options).  Any guess on how many individual pages/options/steps exist after all this time?

[JH_]

I've only really looked at the Addventure back when it started (and vaguely remember the starting options).  Any guess on how many individual pages/options/steps exist after all this time?

http://www.bearchive.com/~addventure/cgi-bin/about.cgi/~addventure/game1/docs

[Silenteye]

You know another thought came to me... is it possible to have a more refined search function in the thread? Like one that does with words of matching phrases instead of episode number? I think people would be able to find certain threads easier... or at last a thread that had an option with the said words?

[Adama]

Not sure what you mean by "more refined".  More refined than what?  The only search function we have is humblefool's Google Addventure search, and doesn't that already do what you're asking about?

[Silenteye]

I apologize I didn't know there was a search engine... the only search engine I was aware of was the one in the addventure main page... Well maybe instead of using Google maybe you can impart the same search system to Beaddventure? I'm sure if you ask Humblefool he would help out?

[Adama]

You must be talking about the "Go to a specific episode" field on the Utilities page...

The Addventure used to have its own built-in search function, but due to the load it put on the system it was only available for people who were BEA Members.  And even that stopped working some time before I became an admin here.

I don't know anything about setting up search engines, and it might put too much load on the system anyway.  There's nothing wrong with just using humblefool's Google utility page is there, since it works and it only searches Addventure pages?

[Silenteye]

Yeah I guess My main issue with is that you have to go directly back to the search he has in order to find a new thread...

[Adama]

You don't have to go all the way back to his search page; you can just modify the search field at the top of the search results page and do a new search, same as for regular Google searches.