How does Discourse rewind count chat messages in the past year?

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current user avatar in chat section
current user avatar in chat section1179×1531 220 KB

Image taken from Own username and avatar displayed when looking at other people’s Rewinds

I noticed that the chat section in my rewind on Meta was no longer available after my last message in the lounge channel was older than three months and therefore deleted. The section is hidden in case you don’t have a “favorite channel,” and since that was the only channel I participated in, it seems Discourse was no longer able to determine my favorite channel.

This made me wonder how the number of chat messages in the last year is determined on forums where at least one of the “retention days” settings is not 0 or greater than 1 year.

I had previously assumed that chat messages in channels and DMs were removed from the database after the “retention days” had expired. So how do we know how many messages the user has written in the past year? Is the data still in the database, and can it be counted there? Why can’t the data also be used to allow me to continue to see the chat messages section even if I haven’t written anything in a public channel in the last 90 days?
Or is the number not really about the past year but only based on the messages available? Shouldn’t the message inside the rewind explain that in this case?

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This

It’s a a for fun thing, it doesn’t really shot for academic accuracy.

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I think the “for fun, not academic accuracy” framing downplays the issue a bit.

This isn’t about small discrepancies - there’s a meaningful difference between “this is your chat activity over the last year” and “this is your chat activity over the last few weeks of retained data.”

When “retention days” are configured (which they are by default), the wording no longer matches what’s being shown and can easily create a false impression. That’s less about precision and more about expectation-setting. Also, a wording like this can unintentionally suggest that deleted chat messages are still being counted or analyzed. Adding something like “based on retained chat data” would clarify this.

And finally, it’s not entirely clear where the “fun” is when the whole chat section in my rewind disappears simply because all public-channel messages have aged out.