The most popular post: "Upper Intermediate - Experiencing Agricultural Life" - how can that be?

I am not talking rank, I am talking no of posts.

Clarence's posts were not erased, he just changed his screen name to xiaohahaha

Oh, yeah, I remember that one. Henning's right.

Right that it's not worth reading, that is.

Apart from user discussion and immediate feedback: Are there plans to do something more systematic with all those comments? Like using some bots, agents to crawl all those conversations or do stuff like make some arcane statistical analysis with pie charts, user movements, geographic clustering, ... ?

They do some manual cleaning up now, but I think they rarely have to. In any case, that thread was very much an anomaly.

Because there were some fierce off-topic discussions. Not worth reading actually.

You know, off-topic flame-o-ramas aside, I liked the topic of that lesson. But it was too much about goofing off and too little about farming. I wonder if maybe ChinesePod could create a lesson on vegetable gardening? (Selfishly, I'd like it to be elementary level.)

Perhaps more specifically about those little gardens people have on their fire escapes/ balconies in big cities?

That would be very cool...those little gardens always amaze me. But I also need to be able to talk about stuff bigger than that. :-)

I just notice that all Clarence's posts have been erased from this thread, while most of the posts are answers to Clarence. Why have they been erased ?

They can already analyse the movements of users (not specific users) pretty well through Google Analytics. Presumably if they wanted more detail for specific users they can just analyse the raw server logs from Apache or what ever it is they use. To analyse the comments they would be best off using humans reading them than a robot/computer and I believe this is what they do