If you’ve looked at our homepage lately, you’ll see we’re heading towards 3.9 million topics, up a couple of hundred thousand since last time we checked in.

I hadn’t heard about any big new data loads, so I went looking for what had caused this sudden spike in our figures. Well, it turns out we’d had that data all along! There were a number of topics in the system that weren’t typed as /common/topic, so weren’t showing up in the count. For example, a bot which had added a number of people (type /people/person) had omitted to co-type as /common/topic, and that doesn’t happen automatically when a bot does it, only when done via the UI>.

Justin discovered this the other day, and since it’s obvious that people are also topics, and so on, he fixed it. So that’s how we’ve got so many “new” topics.