How Conversations and Posts are counted?

MVP

Checked Home page

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Great, but my guess was that each conversation has at least one post. How it is happened that we have ~1.5 time more conversations than posts?

12 Replies

@HotCakeX , thank you, I forgot this 4-months old post. Really, is it called post?

I think posts are normal posts made by users and Microsoft employees.
and conversations are posts + everything else (Blogs, articles etc)

@HotCakeX , hope comments to blogs are not counted as conversations, each comment as separate conversation.

 

I can't say I care about concrete figures, nope. That's more about transparency and trust to the resource. People who are here for a long while could find some explanations or make a guess base on their own experience.

 

First time visitors could have the questions checking the figures on home page

- IMHO, in common logic conversation=thread and posts are elements from which tread is combined

- here you see there are 105 communities in total. Next step is to go on communities page - oops, 17 communities disappeared, All (88)

- now it's bit better, recently we had more members than posts, how that could happens?

 

I know some answers  and have some guesses, but first time visitor won't be able to find them. Less transparency - less trust. On the other hand most probably very few cares.

Wait, what happens to the rest of the communities?

@HotCakeX They are hided from us, some internal stuff. That was explained some ago, but I don't remember details.

If it's hidden from majority of users then it makes sense to fix the numbers on the front page too (88 instead of 105)

Hi all,

 

Great discussion but hopefully I can add some clarity here.

 

Conversations

When someone posts a new post to the community and someone replies to that post that still 1 conversation. So you could have 6 conversations and 50 posts, it just meets those 6 conversations have allot of replies... similarly you could have 6 conversations and only 1 post, this would just mean 5 conversations have no replies.

Posts

This is all replies to conversations, generally we want the number of posts to exceed the number of conversations as that would indicate you, the members are hopefully finding answer to your queries.

 

Members vs Posts

 

Is it possible to have more members than posts / conversations? Totally, it just means there are lots of lurkers and that we need to engage or help users get involved better. What would be odd is to have allot more posts than members, although its still possible you have lots and lots of really engaged members.

Does this help explain some of this?

 

 

Thanks for the explanation, I for one am convinced, although Mr.Sergei started the conversation

so basically the reason why there are more conversations than posts is that there are are ~200,000 unanswered discussions at the moment.

 

 

Let me check that.. it seems a little high..
Yeah, unless,
Conversations = the discussion post (the first post that a user creates in a forum) + comments
&
posts = only comments in discussions

OR
maybe the reason why Conversations count is so higher than Posts count is that Conversations also include blog posts, KB articles and articles ?

@Allen 

Hi Allan,

 

I see now, thank you. As well as @HotCakeX I'm bit surprised and could only take this logic as it is. 

 

What about number of communities, if some are hided, perhaps on communities page to mention All available or like instead of All?