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No, it's not a bug.
The contents are not known to you because you don't have access to all of the forums, but that doesn't make the contents or existence of any messages "private" to everyone nor require any secrecy about them. The contents are in fact, "public". It's just that you don't have access to them.
The stats are not calculated as being the total from each individual's perspective, the stats are just the total things in any area that isn't private messaging. This is for performance, and it is not a bug.
There are many real world examples of software being vague, or plain incorrect, on numbers and other things for performance reasons. The software is behaving exactly as it was designed. Whether it's Google saying there are 50 results and only actually having 17 results, or whether it's some report in the financial service sector that is using an approximation only.
The difference is whether it is more important to be accurate at the potential cost of never being able to give an answer, or to return a vaguely meaningful approximation of an answer at the cost of being accurate.
Accuracy goes out of the window fairly early on in any system designed to be distributed, as consistency itself cannot be guaranteed.
And so it is here. We chose not to be accurate, and to return a potentially incorrect naive sum that almost certainly does not apply to all viewers of the page, as we determine that rendering the page within a second or so is better than potentially not rendering the page.
It is not a bug, and it will not be modified.
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Velocio
Isn't that a bug tho..?
@WillMelling may have expected not only the content of his private posts would not be known by inquisitive folk like me.. but also their very existence in the first place.