I haven't bothered to check, but I'm wondering if you point to a particular post and somebody deletes one before it, do you still get to that post? For example, here's a link to
post 3629 on a long thread. If a post gets deleted before that one does it become 3628? I don't want to actually break a good thread to find out. :x
Look at the link in your post; it specifies "p=10523742&postcount=3629". Paste the link into your browser address bar, but change "3269" to "12345". The same post will be shown, but it will be labeled "#12345". You're getting p=10523742 either way.
But I can pretty well guarantee that the issue is related to deleting a post in a thread.
I think what rodr implies in his OP is right--there's a post count in the thread header, and it can get out-of-sync with actual count of posts. But the error doesn't occur with every delete. Rather, it might be some kind of overlap problem. For example, one user is adding a post when another deletes, and the addition increments a now out-of-date count because the deletion failed to lock the header record. This kind of random error would be seen more often in threads with a lot of activity.
Go to the Sink thread list page, find a thread with a lot of activity, and click on the value in the Replies column. A little box will pop up with user names and post counts. At the top, Total Posts is displayed (I checked the Investments 2020 thread, and post counts add up to the total). In some of those long threads it will be less than the value in the Replies column. Note that Total Posts should be 1 greater than Replies, since the OP is counted in the former but not the latter.
Unless there are "stranded" posts that can't be accessed, it's probably not a problem, just a slight annoyance for us OCD sufferers. Though a search didn't turn up any complaints about this kind of error in vBulletin, I would guess that it has happened before, and somewhere, a vBulletin admin has written a program to recalculate post counts and alleviate this source of OCD stress.
