The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

A brief, non-technical explanation is about the best I can do anyway. I wrote it several months ago and barely remember how it works, although on my to-do list is to tweak it to be an easier formula because it looks like it always takes at least 2 seconds to run and consumes considerable resources when it does.

Basically, it takes the following into account:

1. Number of total BoardMarks
2. Number of BoardMarks placed by people who have posted in the past 30 days
3. Total Number of Posts
4. Average Posts Per Day for the last 30 days

Note that part 2 doesn't care when the boardmark was placed. It's just a weigh of giving more weight to boardmarks belong to currently-active posters. It's a very heavy part of the weighting as is part 4.

There are changes I'd like to make to the formula (for example, taking into account just how many different people have posted to the board in the past 30 days) but it's already a very high-overhead page, and I'm going to tweak it for speed before I complicate it even further.

Something else I should mention that gets asked of me occasionally:

Sometimes the scores will change (even dramatically) on a board that has as much activity today as it had yesterday. This is because of the sliding 30-day window aspect of average daily posts and number of "active" boardmarks.

If the activity was a lot higher 31 days ago than it is today, the score will drop. And if a person who has the board boardmarked hasn't posted in 31 days, that'll also cause a drop.

Also, while I'm at it, there's often some confusion about the first screen that comes up when you hit the "Hot!" menu item. I've seen it even reported on other sites "Hey, that list is totally manipulated! A board that has only one post is showing as the 3rd hottest!"

A name-change for that particular screen is in order.

The first screen that comes up is nothing more than a chronological listing (in reverse order) of the boards that have the most recent posts on them. There's no "scoring" involved there, which is why there're no ordinal "rankings" or a column saying anything about a score.

It would probably make more sense to have the "Top Boards" screen be the one that comes up when you hit "Hot!", but, again, that screen is really expensive, so I set it up this way to reduce the number of hits to it.