When I go to my Profile and look at the list of all the people I follow, the far right column shows “View Journal” links.
Some people have text underneath that link that shows a number next to “journal posts”.
But, when I click on the link to see the journal entries of the people who supposedly have journal posts, the next page that opens shows “No posts yet!”.
I’m pretty sure (?) that stat includes journal posts on projects as well as their “personal” journal. I agree it seems wrong that it doesn’t show the posts on projects (or that the stat isn’t just tallying personal journal posts instead).
Edit: Hmm, that might not be the case, but it does look like the number doesn’t go down when you delete a journal post, at least not immediately.
https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/zeet
Created 2 new journal posts and then deleted them, but profile still says 3.
This is just a database update practice. The iNat database is huge. So, things like this (reports of statistics) aren’t updated right away. There is probably some code/module that gets run at certain times of the day to update this statistic.
There is a person I follow who has over 20 Journal entries. So, the update thing I described above probably isn’t an issue here. It is a problem with the way the code behind the website is functioning. It is displaying something that either is hidden to me or doesn’t exist. I am guessing that there is some way that Journal entries are hidden from followers. If this is the case, then I shouldn’t see a link.
Only drafts are hidden; there isn’t a way to make a journal post published but private. Creating a draft doesn’t make the profile stat go up.
Thanks.
I wonder if those drafts are counting for those journal entries. They shouldn’t appear there if they aren’t accessible to a follower.
The profile still reports 3 journal posts, though there is only 1. The other 2 were deleted a week ago.
I think there are two different things going on here.
Like @bouteloua says, the number on the people I follow page tabulates all journal entries someone has posted, whether it it’s their account’s journal, a project’s journal, or the iNat blog (which explains my 277 journal entries… 
). I agree that it should just show the number of entries one’s posted on one’s personal account, so I made an issue here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2817
The journal number not going down after entries are deleted sounds like a bug, so I made a report here: https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist/issues/2818