Stats compiled between and including: September 29, 1998 and October 29, 1998.

 Clepsydra had 6215 posts and a word count of 52126 stomping all contenders in those two categories, including the two clocks whose scores again were goose eggs in every frame. Warrior Poet might have given her a run this month, but he didn't resurrect himself until the seventh of October or so.

Postings:

Word Count:

Most nicknames:

Readability (courtesy of the Microsoft Word Spelling and Grammar Checker.) These are the corrected results. I subtly erred--OK, OK, I blew it completely--on the first go around. Without going into a lot of detail, which would do no good anyway because I still don't get it, in some cases the averages were drastically damaged by being calculated with a sample size twice what it should have been which would have been OK if the totals had been doubled, but they weren't. Go figure. Anyway, to the chorus of Valkyrie "I told you so"s, I found the proper structured query language incantation and the results follow. My deepest apologies to those who were adversely affected by this error, but I also wish to plead for forgiveness from those who are adversely affected by the correction. TomNine, if you haven't cashed your winner's check yet--DON'T!!! The thugs from the Bureau of Standards will be looking for you.

The criteria for inclusion in this list is at least 400 postings in which the grammar checker was able to calculate a readability score. It was this posting count which was being doubled originally. I'm reasonably confident I solved that particular problem, but I wouldn't swear that there aren't others lurking.

Age level. This is also calculated by feeding the post to the Microsoft Word97 grammar checker. It too contained errors, which caused lower scores in many cases. I should have caught them when I saw ages below 5 showing up, because the parser is supposed to adjust the calculated age level by adding 5 to it. A moment's reflection will tell you that that indicates that the lowest valid score has to be five (except for stumpers, which we'll get to in a moment). Therefore, anyone of normal intelligence would have realized something was wrong. I however, remained blithe, even after Diana pointed it out to me. I did take her comments under advisement and the slow process of thought began to unglaciate in what serves for my brain. I discovered that the parser was missing some of them. Fixed that. Then I applied the correct technique for averaging and got the following results (again, based on a minimum of 400 decipherable posts):

These results are much more in line with what they should be. Even my own tortoise-like mental processes should have told me there was no way anyone could come in first in both of these categories. Once again, sorry, TomNine.

Microsoft Stumping Average (at least 500 posts). A stumper occurs when the checker can neither calculate a readability score or an age level. I had originally intended to include a wordcount of zero as criteria, but that put everybody below the Mendoza line (I shouldn't use terms I can't define, but it's somewhere around .200.) I liked these spectacular averages better:

 Oops, I let myself slip into that one. Sorry.

And that's it. Sorry, bosun, I couldn't get your color right. Word doesn't do puce. Congratulations to all the winners.