2018

December. Its that time of year when we all start thinking about the holidays:

• Hanukkah
• Christmas
• Festivus
• New Year's
• Medallion Hunt
• Winter Carnival
• Super Bowl

You get the idea. For me that means trying to spend some time doing stuff for this web site, always frantically hoping I can get something new added before the hunt and the Carnival, knowing full well that if I don't, it'll be there waiting for me next December (although I am going to commit to getting the Able Minds archive into this site before the hunt). It always does, and I don't mind. But as I get myself into that particular mindset, I find myself poring over the site statistics. This year, I've come across several interesting landmarks and milestones that we've hit this year.

Landmarks, as we all know from hunting, are insanely important. When the clue writer doesn't give us any, we whine incessantly. When we get too many, again we whine incessantly. But we have hit a few this year. And I'm going to touch on them.

20 Years

The first rehash bash took place in 1998, and this site was born not long thereafter. The Rehash bash was on February 8, 1998, and as near as I can tell from the archives that I pulled together when I migrated everything over to this format, Greg Sax wrote the first entry here on the 24th. So, once this years festivities have come and gone, we will have been around for 20 years. I mentioned that in my reflections on the 2017 hunt last February. That's a long time. We've had people come and go, but the group has persisted. We've ventured out into hunts well beyond just the Pioneer Press Hunt. Between other festivals and mock hunts, there's information on 92 different medallion hunts spanning the entire year on this site.

But 92 doesn't make for an interesting landmark or milestone, unless its your birthday or you graduated in 1992 (or 1892, in which case we'd be really impressed that you were reading this page). So there's the list of hunts in the summer that I know about but haven't had the time to add in to the site yet. That'll get us to at least 100, and that is a milestone worth mentioning. Even if you discount extinct hunts, it'll be over 100.

500,000 Posts

OK, we're not quite there yet. The database only has about 285,000 posts in it right now. But there are 222,110 posts at Able Minds, and pulling that in will make for 507,000 posts in the database. That's 20 years worth of discussions within the group, folks. Sure, Facebook has made the influx fall off, but a half a million posts, 25,000 per year, is pretty impressive. And that doesn't include the first few years of posts that will be forever lost to time, before we became a group and thought to save such things.

1500 Pages

When I click "Save", this will become the 1500th page of content on the site. 

• 5 Blog Entries (mostly mine).
• 72 Calendar Events (Rehashes and Predigs and other get-togethers).
• 641 Copies of News Paper Articles (many of which while present are not available for viewing).
• 2 Polls.
• 1 Recipe (yes, we have a cookbook. Feel free to add to it!).
• 167 Stories or other pages that we wrote ourselves (most of which should really fall into blog entries, but the concept of a blog didn't really exist in 1998).
• 508 Treasure Hunts (containing 3586 clues).
• 104 Lists of Treasure Hunts.

So maybe the treasure hunt lists and invisible newspaper articles don't really count, but there's 1500 distinct pieces of content here, and, well, with an extant hunt count in the 80s, I'm adding well over 100 pages a year right now. How cool is that?

In closing, since the subject of calendar events popped up right there, we do have several coming up in the next couple of months, namely the predig and rehash bashes. Check back soon for formal announcements of both.