So I've been keeping track of my downloads, words, and posts for a while now, and I wrote a little python thing that graphs them.

Immediately when I go look at my profile, I know that there's something wrong. There's absolutely no way that I have ninety-five words per post.

So I plug in the data anyways, and here's what that graph looks like:


Clearly something is amiss.
Did something change with how words are counted (i.e. edits now count?) or am I completely bonkers and actually did make a 30,000 word post?
If the computer say you did, then you did, because computers are never wrong.
No coments.
Well, Dear Friend, computers CAN be wrong, especially when some tweaks have been made to the word count script.
I was discussing with Kerm and others last week and the algorithm used to count words was a bit bad. It was suggested to rewrite it and then re-run the calculations with the new algorithm. I'm assuming this is what was done. My guess is that they accidentally counted quotes or code blocks in as well, which would probably result in this sort of dramatic jump. I think my numbers also jumped (although I haven't kept track nearly as much as you have Laughing )
I haven't checked what the new algorithm looks like, but the old one simply added up the number of spaces and subtracted 1, which isn't very good.
Let's throw in some facts. The word counting is indeed pretty bad, counting all the spaces plus 1 minus the quotes. However, admins have the option to rerun the algorithm to count all the words in all your posts, which would result in a more correct counting, because edits and deletion doesn't update it (yet). However, this option didn't remove quotes properly, resulting in a higher word count. I've updated and fixed this algorithm which will be used both when posting and when *manually* updating by admins, which would drop the amount even more. I'm not sure when it will be used, but you will definitely see it in your graph. Wink
  
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