!!!!!!!! THREAD UPDATE !!!!!!!!
Shell has won the the find the missed thread game with his thread on Battlefield 3.See
post for details.
Congratulations Pwnon on being the first person to post a new megathread after the metathread was published. We salute you.
There have been exactly 3 megathread megathreads and 1 megathread megathread megathread. How do I know this? I counted.
There have been 3 Pokemon megathreads, 4 Little Big Planet Threads, and 4 Garry's Mod megathreads. I counted these too.
In this thread we're looking at forced megathreads, megathreads (actually mostly just normal threads) that people put the word "megathread" in the title, hoping that it would eventually become a megathread. This... is the METATHREAD.
(queue thread soundtrack)In fact, I have just finished counting every thread that had the word megathread in the title. Ever. Don't believe me? We'll get to that in a minute. First, here's the statistics.
Summary of Megathreads
I finished compiling the statistics in about an hour, I did it by hand, and I began about noon (central US time) on October 10, 2011. These won't be updated, I don't have the time to do this every time someone posts a new "megathread." This will forever be a snapshot of the forums, right now.
- There are 240 self-appointed megathreads.
- All 240 megathreads were posted by 154 unique users.
- The average megathread is 7.7 pages long.
- The standard deviation of the sample is about 23.
Wall of Shame: Top 10 Megathread Posters
There is an 8-way tie for position 10.
| MackTheHunter | 9 | | Sirrus | 7 | | Skateaton | 7 | | IkeTheGeneric | 6 | | Malestrom | 5 | | Aphtonites | 4 | | keonesan | 4 | | LizzyRascal | 4 | | Vegetarian Zombie | 4 | | Cybertails1998 | 3 | | HellHound | 3 | | Jalenharvey | 3 | | Proog | 3 | | ShadowsfeaR | 3 | | Shinji | 3 | | Theportalmaster | 3 | | ultimamax | 3 |
Quality of Megathreads
With the rare exception, forced megathreads have as much content and last as long as normal threads. Contrary to some "megathread instruction guides" certain forum members tried to make (you know who you are, these threads will show up in the forced megathread index because they have "megathread" in the title), there is not a magic layout that will organized your megathread and make it an awesomethread. In fact, some of the most popular megathreads are not organized.
Here are some common traits of the more popular megathreads:
- They do not feature content copied and pasted from Wikipedia. Please do not do this.
- The first post featured some kind of content to get the thread started. For example, if it's a "post your x" megathread, the author posted their x.
- Successful megathreads are written about content people are actually interested in. Yeah, I know, that surprised you too didn't it? You can make a thread about an essay for English class. It is not likely you will make a megathread out of it though.
- Successful megathreads on the Blockland forums are normally about games or hobbies that lots of people have.
- Calling your thread a megathread is a great way to not make a megathread. Again, the average thread length of a "megathread" is 7 pages. The median is probably closer to 1 or 2.
- Similarly, most successful megathreads do not have megathread in the title. The author just posted something they were interested in and everyone jumped on and they kept the main post up to date.
You should always search before posting a new megathread. Chances are your thread has already been posted. You can also try looking in the index below but it will go out of date very fast, so it's not that reliable.
What was first thread on this forum to have megathread in the title?
It's highly probably that there were other threads in the past that were deleted. That being said, the earliest that we can find through searching is Messing with noobs- A megathread by Sirrus. You will probably not be surprised to learn that this is a megathread by Sirrus. You will probably also not be surprised to learn that he is on our top 10 list of people who try to force megathreads. It was posted on December 3, 2008.
Thank you Sirrus, thanks a lot. 
The Present and the Future
Currently so many threads that are not megathreads have the word megathread in them to the point where megathread is now a meaningless term tacked onto any old thread to make it seem bigger than it actually is. You could think of it as viagra for forum threads.
My proposal is that from now on the forum software automatically tack (megathread) onto every single thread posted to save us the time.
The Index
Well, I said I'd post a list of all the threads I looked at, and I am. It's going to hit the 20,000 character limit at least once, so I'll need several posts. No, I didn't type it out by hand, it's a combination of copying and pasting, manual data entry, and concating strings in excel using the format ="string"&cell&"more strings"&another cell&"end string". I've done data entry before at work so it's not like this took a long time or anything.
Just a thought, when you go to post your megathread megathread with a big list of megathreads because you think it's going to be hilarious, don't do it unless you can top this list. No copying and pasting, you need to write the list yourself like I did. |
