@Eric I've been collecting at as close to 0:30 UTC as I can, though I've occasionally been as much as 4 hours late. I haven't yet figured out when the stats update, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't happen within that block of time.
@Krazer Do you know what link they clicked after they searched that? I'm really curious as to which question had those keywords, lol.
@LoganM They seem to update more than once a day (at least, some of them do). But I would suspect it's something like once every 6 hours or once every 12 hours, synced with midnight.
Yeah, I can imagine. I've never publicized any of my answers.. none of them are that good, lol. I can see myself getting a lot of downvotes on reddit for even trying.
@Mysticial If all you want is an announcer badge, it's rather easy if you're at a university or somewhere else with public computers. It doesn't really matter where you post the link, just log in from 25 computers and go to it. You could get announcer badges for a dozen questions in an afternoon or so.. Getting 300 or even 1000 is quite a bit harder.
@Eric The computer lab down the hall from me has around 30 computers. There's one in our school library with 50. It's not too hard to get enough computers to do it. Not that I've done this, but it doesn't seem hard.
@Mysticial People create fake accounts to upvote their own posts just to get Mortarboard. I've seen it many times on MSO. The serial upvoting gets reversed the next day and the other account gets banned, and sometimes the main user is suspended, but they keep the Mortarboard badge.
@Krazer If you're using the mod tool analytics, there are sometimes mixups in the results that aren't actually right. Usually results from other sites.
So if you see a search string that is easiest explained as pointing at another site, it's entirely likely that it is indeed pointing at another site and the analytics tool is being dumb.
@MadaraUchiha Potentially stupid question: What differentiates comments and answers on discussion meta posts? I'm always unsure as to whether my thought(s) should go in a comment or answer.
@MadaraUchiha Ugh, Morality. When he said we had to write a "paper", I thought it would be an essay. Which can be fun! But nope, we're assessing an argument. It's 25% of our grade and boring as a stick.
Maybe even more boring. With a stick, I can use my imagination.
@JNat Black Mesa and Aperture are basically rivals at odds with one another. Aperture beat BM to the portal technology. Both games are in the same universe