Nigeria board is in a long sprint! 2nd place! Congrats!
I woulnd't be surporised to see them at the top in the near future. Anyway, overview has been updated with your animated chart.
I am somewhat surprised by the overall decrease in activity and posting in January compared to December. December is usually a time for holidays and time spent away from work and home. It turns out we were being a bit lazy. I wonder how much of an affect on the stats the new rule change had? I think a significant one.
Since total number of posts in local boards decreased only 5% compared to month before, its hard to say whether that was just a coincidence or mixer ban indeed had the influence. I don't know whether its just my lack of inspiration, but its harder for me to find interesting conversations lately in the English part of the forum.
Wow!
Indonesian board taking the lead in local board is a big thing.
They had a big help from the external merit sources, therefore those numbers.
I guess of course the inactivity of a very active Merit source as Ratimov had a important role in this, even if next month we will see something similar in the Indonesian board, as o_e_l_e_o left the forum as well.
If you check Russian merit numbers previous year, you will see that they didn't have much higher numbers when he was active, and sometimes even lower than now. Then again, I don't know when exactly he stopped sharing merit he got as a merit source.