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You would need to contact theymos, although I’d say that he has already too much on his plate to attend to additional data petitions.The official forum stats (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats) have not been updated for some time on the forum history section, where even December 2017 is partial. The top indicators seem to be moving, but they are probably all time based and not 2018 only as you require. I’m not even sure if they are all correct, since for example the average posts per day is way smaller than what I derived some time ago (see Bitcointalk – Posts per Day - evolution during past six months), but it may be overall and not narrowed down to recent months. Even so, for a thesis I'd say you need to be pretty sure what each variable represents, its definition and update scheme.
If you want to delimit data to 2018, you could try to use the WayBackMachine (https://archive.org/web/) or Archive Today (http://archive.is) for example, find a snapshot and subtract it from today’s data. You would really need a data snapshot for around 31/12/2017 for your goal, but the nearest to that date is from the 24/11/2017, prior to the hype.
Merit is another approachable theme, but I don’t know if you want to go down that path for your thesis.
Aside from that, some forum members have worked on stats here in different ways (LoyceV, Piggy, coinlocket$, sncc, Vod, zentdex,mazdafunsun and me that I can recall now). Bare in mind that these forum members derive statistics that are not official, but rather useful to understand the scheme of things.
