So I periodically grab data from the API and publicly report the statistics (according to this question I'm allowed to do that) and I noticed a really bizarre inconsistency with my graphs, but it was consistent across multiple sites. (Though it was not consistent across all of them.)
On December 9, 2016 at 00:03:08UTC the Software Engineering site had 135168
answers and 42977
questions. Approximately 24 hours later (10 December 2016 00:03:07UTC) it had 134023
and 42789
respectively, another 24 hours later (11 December 2016 00:03:01UTC) it was at 133979
and 42782
, respectively.
This is not the only site I've noticed this discrepancy with. I've seen it with Super User, DBA, Server Fault, and even this Meta site.
I was just curious as to what happened. Was there some massive trash compactor that ran?
Here's the sample dataset (much shrunk) to demonstrate what I'm seeing:
ApiSiteParameter Gathered TotalAnswers TotalQuestions
softwareengineering 2016-12-11 00:03:01.0525174 133979 42782
softwareengineering 2016-12-10 00:03:07.1150193 134023 42789
softwareengineering 2016-12-09 00:03:08.6461616 135168 42977
meta 2016-12-11 00:01:30.6305214 120809 80496
meta 2016-12-10 00:01:25.4431400 121172 80572
meta 2016-12-09 00:01:13.7712670 121165 80559
serverfault 2016-12-11 00:01:05.1775098 395842 233005
serverfault 2016-12-10 00:01:10.0680812 396342 233412
serverfault 2016-12-09 00:00:59.5526146 396251 233321
superuser 2016-12-11 00:01:17.8024674 497852 333693
superuser 2016-12-10 00:01:12.5230816 498376 334384
superuser 2016-12-09 00:01:01.7400281 498246 334236
dba 2016-12-11 00:03:32.8649598 68062 51038
dba 2016-12-10 00:03:38.0525317 68189 51232
dba 2016-12-09 00:03:36.9119067 68138 51196
They're tab-separated, should paste to Excel nicely.
Here's a graph of what the Software Engineering cleanup looks like:
Was this some sort of pre-winterbash cleanup?