I had intended to post this note over the Thanksgiving holiday, but as so often should and must happen, family takes priority. So a bit late, but here goes:
I have been doing a good bit of reading of late on the subject of gratitude and thankfulness in terms of the role played by others in making our lives richer and more meaningful. As I was researching a repair here on OLF a few weeks back, I happened to note a post with an inordinate number of thanks attached, which as a matter of intellectual curiosity took me into the 'Thanks Toplist' and onward to the 'Thanks List' for a bit of research.
As expected, those with the most posts were often those most thanked, but I also saw a few of those mega-posters with fewer thanks than one might expect. That in turn led me to the notion that some posters generated pearls of wisdom or perhaps just extraordinarily useful posts on a more frequent basis than other posters, with the obvious metric a density function related to how often their posts garnered one or more thanks from the OLF membership. I suspected that a certain number of total posts were needed per poster to avoid the 'one hit wonder' effect, and a bit of analysis suggested a 200 post minimum as a workable filter for those outliers.
When I compiled a list by 'Thanks Metric' (# of thanks/# of total posts), I found that - much as I expected based on my past crawls of the archives - the top spots on the list were all occupied by those that I had previously thought seemed to hit a home run on nearly every at-bat. I would urge those that have read this far to take a quick peek at OLF's 'Thanks Toplist' and 'Thanks List' before moving onto the list below... all three lists are healthy reminders of just how much those named individuals have done to help others here on the OLF.
Mr. Farmer that takes the top spot in the Thankfulness Top 50, which is a natural result of his talent for generating wonderfully pithy, tremendously helpful content every time he puts fingers to keyboard. Close behind are Messrs. Joshnothing, Ford, The Cat (aka, Tounces... forgive me my whimsy as a fellow feline fancier), and Parker, as well as many more of the usual suspects. And #38... Ruby50... I miss you, my friend... rest well, Ed.
So without further adieu, the OLF's Thankfulness Top 50:
Attachment: OLF Thankfulness Metric Top 50.jpg
PS - I recompiled this list using December 2nd, 2022 data, so this is as up-to-date as possible at time of posting.
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