Why some people have 4,294,967,295 posts.

Parent Cafe
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<p>artiesdad,
But until the CC store releases the funds, no posts can be lent to the other threads, thereby effectively freezing the post/thread/forum lending opportunity. Then there will be a panic sale of cc stock.</p>

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<p>Oh, man… Now I’ll <em>never</em> have a high enough count to be able to quit posting someday…</p>

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<p>Steroids???</p>

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<p>Shortsell, aibarr. Or buy a plumbing company and get your 15 minutes of infamy. Or sell a kidney. Or perfect cold fusion.</p>

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<p>You math geeks are freaking me out. :eek:</p>

<p>I still don’t understand how someone can manipulate the website so it appears they have all those posts.</p>

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<p>^^ Don’t ya just hate it when some people get all logical and serious with math and stuff when the rest of us are just bein’ silly ? :wink: (JK)</p>

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<p>Aibarr, if you had posted more prudently in the past, this wouldn’t be an issue now. don’t expect someone else to bail you out with their posts, especially when you persist in posting worthless zero-count Cafe posts…</p>

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<p>Like the bonus points that our family awards for cool words in scrabble.</p>

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<p>Or maybe the VBulletin application is running a bitwise complement on certain postcounts when people register. This would seem to make sense to me, since I haven’t seen any established posters with these post counts - only new members. I could be mistaken, of course.</p>

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<p>^^ But since the number of posts works for most people it’s probably more like an uninitialized variable or they’re subracting 1 from the number of posts and when that number is 0 they get the 0xFFFFFFFF or 4,294,967,295 (as an unsigned int).</p>

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<p>In fact that may be the best explanation:</p>

<p>Person signs up, posts only in the cafes (forums where posts do not add to post count). Person deletes a post in the cafe (or a mod deletes a post), VBulletin subtracts 1 off their post count (which is almost certainly stored as just a number, as opposed to being generated dynamically by examining posts)… and there you have it.</p>

<p>Which means it’s probably an issue with the PHP implementation, since PHP has no unsigned integers in the language itself.</p>

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<p>You numbers people are no fun at all!</p>

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<p>^^ We may not be much fun individually but we make up for it in numbers.</p>

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<p>just making this message to add a post to my count</p>

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<p>gdorf - that’s is a depressingly logical explanation. You win! Here’s your prize: </p>

<p>A few other comments:</p>

<p>Mudder’s Mudder: you’re a genius.</p>

<p>Tetrahedr0n: regarding “4294967295 is also the largest odd number of sides for which a regular polygon can be constructed using a compass and straightedge.” Actually that’s not merely an overstatement, its a lie. Nobody can actually construct a polygon using a compass and a straightedge with over 4 billion sides. Or if they can, the prospect of the attempt is just too depressing to contemplate.</p>

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<p>(I would cheat, draw a circle, and call it a 4 billion sided polygon. That’s less depressing to contemplate, too.)</p>

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<p>Just run a computer simulation of the construction.</p>

<p>My favorite television show is Num3ers. Might be a funs show to spark an interest in math and science in the kids.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the generous prize kluge. ;)</p>

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Indeed. Just remember that in the future when members lose confidence, moderators bemoan the high number of parsed posts (yes, I’m looking at you, Garland), PM’ing freezes, the UC Berkeley forum is allowed to fail, the finger-pointing begins, and panicky posters demand to know why no one saw it coming. </p>

<p>Call artiesdad for bailo-- er, rescue details.</p>

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<p>Mudder’s_Mudder</p>

<p>This is more complicated than we thought. Apparently in an effort to stay afloat some forums in CC acquired posts from the moderators who cleverly sent them posts from the Parents Cafe. Unaware that these posts didn’t count they still added them to the total. Add to that unscrupulous PHP programmers that do not know how to initialize a variable and now we don’t really know how many posts we really have in CC. For all we know Sakky has only posted 6 times.</p>

<p>We have to go back to the 1960’s, when somebody dropped the punched cards where these boards were stored, to find a crisis of the same proportions.</p>

<p>On the positive side according to CNBC LIBOR went down today.</p>