Resetting Community Statistics

[Triumvirate]

I've recently been using phpBB3 for some communities I'm working on and one of the first new features I noticed was in the admin panel index. From there you can reset the board start date.

Doing this can make statistics look inflated for a community that is not very active. (For instance after a month a community has 10 members and 100 posts in 20 topics, but by resetting the start date it makes it look like the forum has those same amounts in just the first day.)

What do you think about having the power to do this? Is it going to be abused by people (perhaps tricking someone into buying a community which isn't actually active but can be made to look like it very easily.)

I think it can definitely be useful, especially for launching a site it makes it easier to set up your forum live and begin working on it with just you/your team as the users and posting members without making your statistics very low, very quickly (like going down to .01 posts per day before your forum is even launched.) On the other hand, I still think it has its down sides as well.
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MMO Gaming

[Patrick]

Hey Brandon,

Interesting thoughts, thanks for bringing this up. You know, I can see this both ways. It may make it easier for people to deceive, but at the same time this sort of thing has always been possible and not too hard with a fairly basic MySQL query, right?

This feature probably gives all posts the same day and time, doesn't it? If so, I think that would be a red flag that people can catch.

So, I don't know that I'm really concerned by it being included as a feature.

Patrick
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