Does Anyone Know What's Going On Here?

[fiction-factory]

Answers and new questions are still coming in on this April 2013 Crosswords thread
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Quizzes-and-Puzzles/Crosswords/Question1237973-7.html

[fiction-factory]

I just wondered whether some posts are jumping to this thread in error- or maybe people are clicking on and answering a Related Thread in error

[Prudie]

Gosh who are all those people, it's like a parallel universe ;-)

[fiction-factory]

A lot of them are regular posters and seem to know the system so i'm not quite sure how they ended up on here

[pixie374]

That's really strange. I don't even recognise most of the names either.

[fiction-factory]

It's occurred to me that there are probably lots of threads like this. Occasional or new posters looking for an answer probably do a Google search on something like 'Daily Mail (or Times or You Mag etc) Crossword answer' and often get taken to an old AB crossword thread and they just tag their question onto that thread and/or answer the several year old question as they don't know you have to tab down to check for answers

[pixie374]

The Twilight Zone...

[naomi24]

A boost in numbers....

[ummmm]

Some banned users used to use crosswords to get their count up know the old questions won't appear in latest posts.

[MargoTester]

Ummmm - don't understand 'used crosswords to get their count up' what's that all about?

[naomi24]

I suspect it's not to increase the posters' count...

[MargoTester]

But what is 'the count' am I being dim here?

[naomi24]

The number of 'hits' on the site.

[fiction-factory]

I wondered if naomi might be implying that somebody is creating artificial posts in order to boost the site's usage figures and make it more attractive to advertisers.

[MargoTester]

Ahhh - light dawns! Thank you FF

[fiction-factory]

I doubt that there is any truth in that.

[vulcan42]

GCHQ are using the site to pass on coded messages.

[Prudie]

I'd have thought it more likely ummmm means that if you have a bunch of posts on your profile it looks like you're a regular legit user ie count
Also it used to be that you had to post a certain amount before you could get an avatar - also points to being a regular plus I believe in the very old days new members names appeared in green???

[Captain2]

It is probably a bit more common than you think. Scorpiojo and I found another old crossword thread (can't find it now) which contained regulars and lost souls dating back about 6 years. We were looking for why a regular Xworder would thank or query on his threads for a while and then seemingly not comment for a period of time.

Then the other night I came across this one
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Quizzes-and-Puzzles/Question452931-4.html

All very strange

[fiction-factory]

Yes, I seem to remember someone found an old thread containing dozens of unrelated answers (for different clues) going back over several years from one long standing poster .

[fiction-factory]

Ed's just found another one
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Quizzes-and-Puzzles/Crosswords/Question1262741-10.html
I bet loads of posts are going on old threads like this