A Ranking Algorithm

[ahmads]

The current way of ordering the posts (by date or votes) has no way to surface the “hottest” posts; a raking algorithm would help solve that problem and greatly improve the user experience.

[cenrak]

There are a couple of ways that I could think of for this:

1. Average upvotes per day, lets call it AUPD : This value equals to ((Total Number of Upvotes) / (The number of days since the post was published)). Posts with higher AUPD are shown first. There are two ways to calculate AUPD:
   1. On the fly. Once the main page is requested with AUPD, you will have to go through all posts in @posts and order them to AUPD, through calculating AUPD for each post, then sort them. <- Really bad O()
   2. Create a new AUPD column in the DB. The column is updated 1)daily for all posts, by a worker and 2)when a user upvotes a post, for that specific post.
2. Average upvotes per view = ((Total Number of Upvotes)/(Total post views)). You can get the number of upvotes from post_votes and for the views, you can either have a counter to each post or a Visit model. Visit model would help in cases like number 4.
3. Average views per day = ((Total views)/(Number of days since the post was published))
4. You can change per day to per the last X days for 1 and 3. If you have a Visit mode, you can query the visits for the last month.

Lets be real. A hot post means that it's attracting lots of visitors. Moreover, it's getting lots of upvotes. So, I guess the second approach Average upvotes per view would be the one. Kaman, It would be even cooler if it's something like (Average upvotes per views) in the last week = ((Total Upvotes in the past week)/(Total views in the past week))

[KrayemLy]

you can build many different ways to order the posts
daily or weekly or both & overall ordering

• order types : (newest,hottest by views , hottest by votes & hottest by replies )

look at stackoverflow options
http://stackoverflow.com/
they have usefully listing ways for the questions
(( http://meta.stackoverflow.com/ ))

[mznmel]

Thanks all for the interesting discussion. I agree with you, a ranking algorithm would make the website much more useful.

I'm planing to implement an algorithm that's very similar to the one that's used by HackerNews. Here's the algorithm with a good discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
It's most likely to be released with the next major version of Progmr, which's due sometime within the next week.