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GracieT's avatar

How many pages of questions are there?

Asked by GracieT (7393points) January 25th, 2014

I just took a trip to the first page of questions that I could reach, and even though it was archived, the first question was about salt and pepper, asked by @ben. Is that the total number of questions, or are there more that we just cannot see?

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11 Answers

dxs's avatar

That should be all that weren’t modded. Every question has a unique number in it’s url, and those numbers started from 1. This question is question #168343, so if you type in fluther.com/168343, you’ll get to this question. If you type in fluther.com/1, you’ll get the salt and pepper question. Every question has a number, even the modded ones. Ones that were removed won’t have a result (try typing in fluther.com/78). Others are just in editing, so they won’t appear on the page that lists the questions, but they will still appear if you type in it’s question number (I can’t find a number to give an example of this).
If you want to know how many pages of questions, then you’d have to play a guessing game because the questions are sorted by category—general, social, and meta. I could tell you the process of how to do this if you really want to, but that process is long and tedious.

ucme's avatar

Makes War & Peace look like a pamphlet.

Brian1946's avatar

As of this post, the highest numbered question is 168,352.
There are 35 questions per page.

168,352/35≈4,810.06.

So there is a total of 4,810 full pages for all sections combined, with two remaining questions distributed over one or two partially-populated pages.

dxs's avatar

^^You can’t simply do that math because you have to take into account the modded questions. It’s harder than it looks. To my knowledge, it’s all a guessing game of predicting the highest numbered page.

Brian1946's avatar

By inserting the appropriate variables in http://www.fluther.com/browse/section/?page=x, I counted a total of 4,230 pages of publicly-visible questions for the 3 extant sections.

Brian1946's avatar

E.g., http://www.fluther.com/browse/general/?page=2600 will take you to the highest-numbered page of questions and the link to the oldest question in the General section.

dxs's avatar

And you guess 2600, right?

Brian1946's avatar

I’m not guessing that the highest-numbered page in the General section is 2600. When I go to that page, I see no links to a higher-numbered page.

I extrapolated (guessed that the General section went up to page…) the page-number variable to 3000.

When I saw that page number was too high, I inserted a page number of 2000, etc.

dxs's avatar

^Yes. That is pretty much what I meant. Estimating but sort-of guessing. And you did that with the other sections, too, and added up the page numbers? That’s the method I would have used. @GracieT Thank @Brian1946 for doing the difficult work.

Brian1946's avatar

@dxs

And you did that with the other sections, too, and added up the page numbers?

That’s right.

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