lobsters/lobsters

Stats extrapolation is bad on the 1st of the month

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#1888 opened on Feb 1, 2026

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buggood first issue

Description

https://lobste.rs/stats

The charts do naive extrapolation for the current month, multiplying "activity so far" out to cover the rest of the month. The charts also run just after midnight. So if there is any activity right before a chart is generated, the extrapolated value is ridiculous.

An easy fix would be to clamp to the highest seen value, but maybe someone would like to implement smarter extrapolation? Worth noting that, like most social sites, our traffic has a strong weekly shape where Monday is the most active day, it declines over the week to be ~50% of Monday on either weekend day.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
ruby
Domain
analyticsbackend
Issue type
bug
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
under 1 hour
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
fresh
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
RubyRailsGit
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
80
Research direction
Investigate the stats page controller and model that computes monthly extrapolation. Look for the multiplication factor used to extrapolate activity. Implement a clamp to cap the extrapolated value at the maximum seen so far. Consider if a more sophisticated extrapolation accounting for weekly patterns is desired.