I shouldn't have opened this thread...I'm starting to become very paranoid about the content/quality of my posts!
Post 4,999,999... ....and the board crashes, resets the counter back to zero. Or Anthony reboots the board and we spend a year doing TrekBBS: 52, till we get to the New TrekBBS. Or They announce Bad Robot is taking over the board. Adding a lensflare script, and replacing all of us with younger, better looking versions, that use the same screennames.
I do wonder if the occasional board trimming also has reduced the number. I notice the 'post numbers' in the automatically generated URLs are into the 8.7million range but I don't know what those start at...
Those start with the initial post (post #1, usually automatically generated in the installation process) that was made when the current board was installed. The database always counts all posts that ever were made. Renumbering posts when some get deleted would require too many calculations. As the post numbers are in the 8.7 million range, we can deduce that since the board was made, about 3.7 million posts got deleted while 4,965,923 were kept. The same number system goes for threads: about 228,000 were made but currently only 130,752 exist.
Going on PostIDs, here's the five millionth post. Of course, that doesn't really take into account anything deleted before we moved to this software, or any post renumbering due to server moves/re-importing/etc. (Incidentally, this post is ID 8777737. At the top right of every post, you'll find a link to the individual post. Mine is the sixtieth in this thread so it'll say "#60". If you then hover over it, at the bottom-left of your screen you can find the URL it will go to, which ends in "p=" followed by some long number, which will be your post's PostID.)