Report on thread activity measured by posts per hour

Report on thread activity measured by posts per hour

Most active hour: 5:00 pm EST (10:00 pm GMT)
Least Active hour: 6:00 am EST (11:00 am GMT)
Data: http://imgur.com/a/A1Yvd#OnGFF7f

Summary: The data here truly speaks for itself. There are definite, discernible periods of both relative high and low activity. Specifically, the thread heats up from 2 pm to 10 pm (for ease, all times here will be EST), and cools down between 3 am to 1 pm. We can see this ebb and flow pretty clearly on a line graph (http://imgur.com/a/A1Yvd#wlZNr3V). Of special note is the five hour period of time between 5 and 10 pm, during which 34% of all posting occurs. Put another way, a third of all posts here are made in one fifth of the day.

The total average number of posts per hour is 83. The largest number of posts/hour recorded in a thread was 410 during 5:00 pm in thread 130107 (some of you might remember this as the 4000+ post thread). The smallest number of posts recorded was 5 during the hour of 5:00 am in thread 121230. As stated above, the most active hour here is 5:00 pm, averaging almost 3 posts per minute. The least active hour, 6:00 am, averages 1 post every 3 minutes.

The data is pretty reliable. The average correlation of each datum to the overall average is statistically strong at .734. What this means is that, on average, each thread’s data has a strong relationship to the average of ALL the data. In other words, we can trust the results.