For some reason, people find it entertaining to count in Discord channels. I deployed analytics in the form of this Discord bot.
I'm not sure if you've experienced this yourself, but in any given chat, for some reason people will occasionally start sending numbers counting up. I've seen it develop spontaneously and independently in 3 different Discord communities, and each eventually implemented a dedicated channel. For counting.
It's an interesting social question, of why collaboration on an inexorable trek toward infinity in a chat would so inspire people, but in addition I was curious as to the statistics of this activity. Who's counting, when are they counting, how much and how accurate is the counting, and so on? That's what I designed this Discord bot (i.e. a special type of account that can perform automated tasks) to do.
Written in Python using the discordpy wrapper to the Discord API, the bot reads and parses messages in the server's assigned counting channel. Then, it references and updates an SQL database for the (in some cases hundreds of thousands of) counts, in order to then reduce and plot data, provide leaderboards and stats, activity heatmaps, counting error detections, etc.
I tested this on a server with over 100,000 counts by hundreds of unique users over the years. What did I find? Honestly, not much interesting. But it's a fun toy.
Some things I need to work on before deploying this in the wild: input sanitization, cleaner-looking output.