archving is not done by date. It's done by page number.



If a forum has 3 or 4 pages of posts that date back a few years then that tells you right there just how SLOW that forum is in generating threads or responses to those threads. Just because a forum is slow does not always mean it's not a popular forum at all.



HerpNews forum is a pretty popular forum - lots of people read it, but there is not much need for people to respond to the news articles posted there so it will never make the top 10 list.



And just because a forum has 4 or 5 pages right now does not mean that is what it is set for. Those extra pages could have been generated by current activity that later in the week when the archiving program kicks in, will cut out some of the older posts bringing the forums back down to the set page limit.





>>and IMO the "unfairest" example of all:

>>BP business trends, only three pages but goes all the way back to Nov 2005. Yes, the "5th most popular" forum is comparing almost 2 1/2 years worth of threads to other forums 1 1/2 months worth.

>>





That particular forum has taken that long to generate enough threads to make it to 3 pages. That forum is only limited to 3 pages. So each week the archive program runs and maybe only one or two threads get knocked off assuming someone has started a new thread or two during that week. The reason that forum is even in the popular list is that if you look, the topics discussed there are highly volatile.. in other words, those topics generate a LOT of responses out of people. Remember, each page holds 50 threads, but unlimited responses. It's easy for a forum to have 3 pages of threads with only 150 posts total.. it would mean no one responded to any of those threads. It's also possible for another forum with only 3 pages of threads having over 1,500 total posts on it because it would mean that most threads generated a heavy response out of the other members of the forum. There will come a time when the BP business trend forum will get knocked off the popular list.. and that will be when some of the bigger threads finally make their way to page 4 and then archived off...but since that forum is a slow one, it will take a while for that to happen.
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PHWyvern

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