Thank you, Ian!
Your suggested method of tracing them might not work because sometimes loans don't just get posted in the order of business IDs - for example, loans of Field Partners that are over their quota might get held back or translations delay the process (like with Parvina Kurbanova, I guess).
Still: fascinating to look behind the scenes, like that.
Best wishes,
Wolfgang.
Yes, the methodology I proposed only works as a one-off to get some idea of where the "inactive" ones end. (#87698 is the last one I just found, about 80 higher than the last one posted at the moment.)
To make a proper app out of it, the app would have to keep a list of all inactive loans it knows about and remove loans from the list as they become active. (So its list will end up with "holes" in it.) It would also do the scanning for new inactive loans, starting from the highest number in the list to (say) 10 beyond the highest number, and adding them to the list as it finds them.
If I was setting it up, I would start it off with an arbitrary number (say 1000 below the most recent loan posted) and put up with the fact that there might still be some inactive loans more than 1000 ids "old" which it won't then detect.
This reminds me of an app I wrote about 10 years ago which downloaded all new messages posted on a message board for a website that I was webmaster of. Each message was originally assigned a sequential "message number", so each morning I just started the app looking for the last message it had found the previous day, and it kept downloading messages to my archive until it found 100 missing messages in a row. (Had to allow for gaps in case any of the other "moderators" had deleted anything while I was asleep.)
Ah, the good old days.
