Didn't some stock trader make that mistake yesterday?

No, not at all.

Lets make OMNI count towards no of posts again and we will have 1bn threads in no time.

The information on who posted the 1,000,000th thread on FlyerTalk will be published in The Gate as soon as we receive the official information from Randy Petersen.

I did the same thing. I had a few things that I wanted to post earlier in the day, but held off until I saw that we were close to 1,000,000. When I started one of the threads, I saw that we were at 999,996 and when I finished it, I saw that we were at 1,000,004. So close!

It seems to me that the actual one millionth thread (thread ID 1,000,000, which I guess doesn't including rewriting history by deleting threads) was created on 29 September 2009.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1000000

Right. Let us know soon as possible if Randy will have a offered who will wins the 1 millions thread.

The winner has apparently been announced: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/thegat...ertalk-thread/

It's unclear, though, exactly how this was determined??

Thanks for the questions.

What regular members don't see is the constant ebb and flow of FlyerTalk. Threads and thread counts are in constant flux, caused primarily because of three different factors that you aren't always aware of:
1) Thread Soft Deletes
2) Thread Mergers
3) Thread Splits

For instance, for May 6 and 7, there were 407 types of change actions, some and in fact, many from this group of three. Soft deletes are typically the large majority because they are the spammers that really hit FlyerTalk and for which the volunteer Moderators do a fabulous job in keeping most from interfering with your use of FlyerTalk. The others are self-explanatory.

What this means is that it is difficult to determine the 1,000,000 thread in real-time as we need to settle the ebb and flow of spammers, etc. I'm sure you would join me in not being real impressed if one of their threads was the 1,000,000th.

When we knew the time was near, we made a new thread in a private test forum and determined the thread count from there. We allowed a period of "grace" to happen to that we could best guess when the latest number of spammers were cleaned up and kept testing thread count based on the logs being posted for all the change actions. Again, during the period of the 1,000,000th thread, there were 407 change actions, over 300 of them which could influence the exact number of the thread.

Because of the high level of spammers whose soft and hard deletes could effect an actual 1,000,000th thread, it at times looks like .... 2 threads forward, one back, one forward, two back, 5 threads forward, three threads forward, two threads back, one more back, 2 threads forward, 2 threads forward, five threads back, etc.

Mikel did the testing the the selection of the 1,000,000th thread based on the process i mention above with the test threads and we feel comfortable with the results given the ever changing nature of change actions. With nearly 80 volunteer moderators, there's always a lot going on whether spammers, thread splits and thread mergers and again, our regular members (thank you all) don't really see the dynamics of these activities. No doubt that in 2010 we'll see more than 100,000 of these types of change actions during the course of 2010.

We are extremely proud of our "mile"stones and it's because of our members that we have these types of things to recognize, thank you all.

As for the iPad .... look for more giveaways over the rest of the year. So far I've bought three of them as rewards either on FlyerTalk or on BoardingArea. Very popular and you'll all have more chances.

Cheers.