The Magic Café Dataset
I am an advid reader of The Magic Café, with nearly 13 years browsing thousands of threads ranging from “How to Dress” to “How do I improve my Bottom Deal.” I also enjoy magic drama and reading fights between users.
Most magicians, amateur or professional, know about The Magic Café. Steve Brook started The Magic Café in 2001 to stay in touch with magic friends (EndersGame, 2020). At the time of this post, it has been online for 20 years, older than Twitter (2006) and Facebook (2004). How has the community changed over time? Is the community still as active as it was a decade ago? I have scraped the public posts to answer these questions and more.
This post introduces the dataset and includes a summary of the basic statistics. In future posts, I will explore the dataset in more depth. If you want to skip the fluff and jump into the dataset yourself, find the dataset and code below:
Download: Link.
Code: Link
Basic Statistics
| Total Threads | 321463 |
| Total Posts | 6029642 |
| Average Posts per Thread | 18.76 |
With more than 300k threads, the dataset is large given the niche community. Moreover, the forum is active, with nearly 19 posts per thread on average. The Magic Café has averaged 300k new posts per year.
| Subforum | Count |
|---|---|
| The workers | 25534 |
| Penny for your thoughts | 23259 |
| Not very magical, still… | 20599 |
| Latest and Greatest? | 16486 |
| Tricks & Effects | 13564 |
| Nothing up my sleeve… | 11094 |
| The spooky, the mysterious…the bizarre! | 10937 |
| Our new arrivals | 10803 |
| The little darlings | 10329 |
| Grand illusion | 8638 |
The most popular subforum on the site is “The workers,” a subforum dedicated to card magic. Closly trailing card magic is the subforum on mentalism, titled “Penny for your thoughts.” The numbers are unsurprising for three reasons. First, online communities do not last for 20 years unless they are active. Second, card magic and mentalism have a special aurora around them with relationships with gambling and simply reading the mind of strangers. Third, this information is accessible by simply summing the numbers available on the site as shown below:
But, what else can we do with the dataset that is not accessible on the website’s front page? Below, I answer a few simple questions using the dataset.
Which thread contains the most posts?
“Take any card you like..not THAT one!” –Every Magician
Magicians love one liners and hacky premises. This is evident given the ten longest threads listed below:
The longest thread on the forum, “Answer a Question with a Question,” has 1,250 pages of content (25k total posts), the post goes on and on and on and on. Go ahead and read each of the popular posts, I’m sure there are gags there that you already use (I know I do).
Future work: Make an app that shocks me every time I say something that has been said 5 million times.
What is the longest post made on The Magic Café?
The longest post was made by Lawrence O, with 32 thousand total words. It is a list of references for sponge ball routines. While some effort went into compiling the list, it is the definition of information overload. It is more useful to either post 3-5 favoriate references, or just link to the references on Conjuring Archive.
References
- EndersGame. (2020). Interview on Magic with Collector & Magician Steve Brooks (The Magic Cafe). In PlayingCardDecks.com. https://playingcarddecks.com/blogs/all-in/interview-on-magic-with-collector-magician-steve-brooks-the-magic-cafe