The CURRENT FR chat-thread number is:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3975241/
That’s 3million, 975thousand, 241.
Your experimental number is much too large.
Try 2million (https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2000000/posts)
And go from there.
That takes me back to 2008. But ThankQ. I am trying to find October 2017. I was close with the big 400000000 number.
We’re talking about two kinds of numbers, I think. While there are nearly 4M threads, there seem to be over 400M individual comments. The number used in the ping “next page” appears to be a post number rather than a thread number.
Those numbers imply an average of 120 comments per thread. We are way above average! (in every way)