Who posts the most TRs on TAY??

There should be frequent poster points that we can redeem at the sponsor's stores.

Armar... for God's sake buy a Kindle!
I think you are exaggerating.....1000's of books???????

Armar... for God's sake buy a Kindle!
I think you are exaggerating.....1000's of books???????

Anyone who's been to my place knows I'm not exaggerating much: over 2000 books, most of which are mine, but usually also including 500+ library books from 3 different library systems (UW, SPL, KCLS). I don't think I have bibliomania. But I do read a lot. There is so much to learn.

Kindle? It's designed for text-only content like novels, and sucks for anything that I usually read -- almost all of my books contain extensive diagrams, maps, graphics and photos, often in color. Guidebooks, mountain books, scientific books, etc. It would be great if there was some way to get that type of book in a useful digital format like PDF, but probably 99.99+% of such books are not available in PDF, and older books will likely never be available digitally.

And Scotsmarm, for God's sake can you please spell my name correctly: Amar, it's in the left sidebar for ready reference. This is at least the 3rd recent post in which you've misspelled my name in this manner. Thanks.

I have a 1000 books. That's nothing. Amar's place is one big book, seriously. In fact, opening the front door is just turning a page

Anyone who's been to my place knows I'm not exaggerating much: over 2000 books, ...

LOL. Typical scientist [and extraordinary ski mountaineer).  When I retired I donated my science library to the research lab where I worked--somewhere around 9,000 scientific reprints and only 100 or so books (in my field books go out of date very quickly and I'm very good about getting rid of obsolete things, except a collection of 25 or so benchmark books in statistics).  And all those 30 years 100s of issues of a dozen or so scientific journals most of which were book size. Of course, I had another library on skiing, fly-fishing, white-water rafting, adventure motorcycling, nature field guides, hiking and biking guides, travel guides to various foreign countries, poetry, African musicology,  etc. etc. etc. 

Can you set up a separate category for June and July TRs?
(Not specific to any single year, just ranking cumulative TRs for June and July over the last several years -- I want to improve my TR:FS ratio!

Interesting idea, I hadn't thought of summing up totals by month -- I'll add that feature. Might take a bit of extra work to separate out July-August and September-October TRs, since those months were paired together prior to 2006.

Well, that feature has been added -- there is now a table of the leading OPs for each month (counting backcountry TRs only), along with some more graphics to liven up the page, namely bar graphs of yearly and monthly stats:
www.skimountaineer.com/Tools/TAY-Stats.html

As expected, it took a lot of extra work to separate out the combined July-August and September-October TRs for 2005 and earlier. It's not elegant to be forced to write code with a lot of special-case exceptions hard-coded into it. But I think it's working reliably now.

So what do the monthly stats show?
The number of topics and OPs is relatively constant through the winter months, with a total of about 750 topics posted by just under 300 OPs so far for each of the 4 months from December to March. Then a spike upward in May and June, followed a steady decline throughout July to the yearly minimum in September, and then a nearly symmetrical upswing throughout autumn. The late-summer months of August-September-October have only about 1/3 to 1/4 of the posting rate of the winter months. But intriguingly, there are significantly more replies per topic during the late summer than during the winter, about a 50% increase in the reply rate, so the fewer TRs of summer are nevertheless getting a large amount of attention.



Certainly it's an interesting monthly posting distribution, which should be unique to the Pacific Northwest among backcountry skiing trip-report forums. The Rockies or even the Sierra would look very different!

Since the TAY Trip Reports didn't actually become a user-postable forum until October 2002 (TRs were added manually by Charles prior to that), posts before that month are not fully and properly counted by the script.

If you look through the old TR months prior to that, you can see that the OP's name is usually listed in plain text, not as a link to a user profile, and often the name listed does not exactly match any current TAY username. Even if the name does happen to match, the user number (which would be in the link to the user profile) is missing if the name is unlinked. Thus the PHP script has no way of properly assigning such posts to their proper author, since all of that is done based on user number. So there is some unavoidable undercounting of the older manual posts prior to October 2002, and those are not fully included in the totals for most early-joining TAY members.

The script now tries to properly assign as many of these older trip reports (from 2001 through October 2002) as possible to the proper OP, based on the info in the listed username. If it can be unambiguously determined that the original listed author is the same person as a current TAY member, then those older TRs have been counted for that person. Of the 250 older TRs which have no user number listed, the script currently restores 200 of them to the proper author, while 50 others remain which I was not able to assign to any current user. That's probably about all that can be done, and I'm not planning to spend any more time on that issue.

So the listed TR totals for a number of the early TAY members have increased significantly. Here's a breakdown of the 200 TRs that could be assigned to current users: ron j: 38,  markharf: 37,  acarey: 28,  BrentH: 20,  Mad_Dog: 12,  TobyT: 10,  David_Coleman: 8,  bscott: 7,  NickD: 6,  Phil_H: 5,  paul_smith: 3,  Pete A: 3,  jersan: 3,  Charles: 2,  RRandall: 2,  Sam Avaiusini: 2,  Ben Kaufman: 2,  dkoelle: 2,  Bill f: 2,  GregLange: 1,  Amar Andalkar: 1,  GerryH: 1,  alpentalcorey: 1,  Robie: 1,  Richard_Korry: 1,  russ: 1,  ProGuiding: 1 (that last one is actually from March 2006, but for whatever reason has no user number set).