3
$\begingroup$

I was on the Physics Stack Exchange site and just somehow went to view the profile page of the Community bot. I did not notice this before that the number of people reached by it is designated as $\infty$. I know that this shouldn't bother me as this is not a serious issue. Nor should I increase traffic by asking such a trivial question here. But my curiosity got the best of me.

What might have been the purpose of doing so by Stack Exchange? Is it supposed to imply that SE is the greatest Q&A site ever and probably that shall ever be? Or is it just something spooky created by SE?

$\endgroup$
2
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ Or it's just a hard-coded symbol for Community to prevent it from actually being calculated. In either event, this seems more a question for Meta Stack Exchange since it's not just the Physics site that has the infinite designation. $\endgroup$
    – Kyle Kanos
    Commented Jan 6 at 16:31
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Apparently it was calculated at some point meta.stackexchange.com/q/257435/552049 $\endgroup$
    – Anyon
    Commented Jan 7 at 0:15

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2
$\begingroup$

There is now an official answer, posted by a staff member (Aaron Bertrand) on the main meta site. In short, values for the community user were calculated in the past, leading to performance issues due to queries that don't produce any particularly useful data as the network grew. So the query was removed entirely. The reason why an infinity symbol is now shown instead of something like N/A is apparently that another staff member (Adam Lear) found it funnier.

$\endgroup$

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .