Discrepancy between about page statistics and exported reports

I’m not entirely sure if this is a bug, but I’m seeking a bit more information about how the reported statistics work.

On our instance (julialang), the /about page shows some summary statistics, including the total number of posts. In our case, that displays 122k posts over the entire site history. But when I export /admin/reports/posts over the entire history of the site and sum the daily counts, I get 103k. This is a discrepancy of 20%. Which number is right?

All the other summary statistics are either spot on or slightly under their respective reports and within 1% — I imagine that’s just due to slightly stale data which is just fine. Why would this one be so far off? We very rarely delete posts and I’m quite certain we don’t have 20% deleted posts. Are there any other reasons why this would be different? Edit: perhaps the /about page stats include post edits in its count?

Probably personal messages, which are not public posts, but are posts.

1 Like