For blogs, comments are counted from zero. In other words, the blog itself is not included in the count.

 

For forum posts, the count starts at one, as if the forum post itself is counted as a comment. This minor inconsistency slightly rankles, since when I look at the comment count I keep going "ooh, someone commented already" quickly followed by "oh, no they didn't" 

yeah.... hrmmm... that is because the first forum post is a post about the topic - it has equal weight as the rest of the posts, whereas a blog is the main piece. i guess i see what you are saying, but i'm not sure we can fix that.

Is that code mixed together so that you aren't able to subtract one from the forum comment count without messing up the other count?