Many of the threads/comments that received merits were actually deleted or not accessible so some of that data is not actually appearing in the graph.
That does make sense, but it would mean almost 58% of all merits were sent to posts that have now been deleted.
I've just (manually) checked a sample of posts with high amounts of merit from
theymos' data in human readable format (17 MB), and from that I'd say less than 10% went to deleted posts.
If an entire thread is deleted, obviously you can't see the board anymore. But did you included the board for deleted posts where the thread still exists?
Im planning to keep it updated.
Very nice!
The rule i used was to discard comments from the counting regardless if the thread was still there.
It is strange indeed that so many comments with merits were actually removed, but i had specifically put a flag for it so im pretty confident that what is missing is for that reason.
I will pick few cases and check actually by hand if there is more to it that i missed.
In any case i believe the graph has enought data to give a good representation of where the merits are going.