Who posts the most TRs on TAY??

As TAY has grown over the years, I've often wondered who posted the most trip reports on this site. It's easy to find out which members have the most posts ( click here ) and everyone's total count of posts is displayed beside every post, but there is no mechanism in place on TAY which counts the number of TRs or the number of original posts (not counting replies).

So yesterday evening, out of ongoing curiosity and mainly as practice to keep my programming skills sharp, I wrote a quick PHP script which answers those questions. Once the basic script was up and working, it quickly grew substantially to summarize and display the stats for each year's TRs, with a list of the top OPs for each month and year. Analysis of the 4 main "Hot Air" boards in addition to the TRs was also added later.

The latest output of the script is viewable at:
www.skimountaineer.com/Tools/TAY-Stats.html

The "OPs" column refers to "original posters", also known as "topic starters". The current script shows the top 100 topic starters for backcountry TRs only, for backcountry + lift TRs, and for all main boards together.

Some interesting results:
* Out of 5300+ current TAY members, over 2000 have started a topic, with "Personal Yardsale" being by far the most widely posted-to board, with over 1000 OPs. The average OP has started about 8.5 topics.
* Nearly 1000 members have posted a TR in either the backcountry TR or lift sections, with an average of 9 TRs for each of those members. (Note that a small fraction of the posts in the lift section are not TRs, but there is no easy way to separate those out from actual lift TRs.)
* Surprisingly, the numbers of TRs and OPs has been almost constant for the last 3 years (2008, 2009, 2010), with about 1100-1200 TRs and 330 OPs per year. The formerly rapid growth of TAY has clearly leveled off for quite some time, even though the growth in backcountry skiing does not appear to have similarly leveled off.

I have not publicly linked the actual PHP script to avoid excess server load on TAY, since the script needs to load 230+ pages from TAY each time it is run (1 page for every 100 topics in each board). Run time for the script is about 1-2 minutes, depending on how busy the TAY server is.

Any suggestions for improvements to the script are welcome.


[size=small](Edited to change the link above to a more permanent URL.)[/size]

Good stuff Amar -- I'll dig into it a bit more later.

Amar, thanks for the interesting stats.  Shocking to see my first TR in 2001, that's 10 years ago!

Cool!

Go, Silas! Perhaps also a candidate for the highest "TRs posted : stash info revealed" ratio!

Amar, thanks for the interesting stats.  Shocking to see my first TR in 2001, that's 10 years ago!

Yeah, interesting.  Just the other day I was trying to remember when this all began; now I know for me--my first trip report here was April 2001 (unless there were trip reports before that that are not in the newer database).  Brings back recollections of telemarque.com, a telemarking website run by a student that preceded the commercial telemarktips.com by years; I used to post trip reports on telemarque.com before TAY was developed.

This is really interesting. I like to think I rarely post trs but I guess those few here and there added up over the years. Especially when I consider that I accompanied Mike on the bulk of his while he lived up here. Adding kids to the mix slowed me down considerably but I still get out there.