Re: Like Stats
Reply #4 –
I'm not sure if I can define it outright, perhaps you can help me design something worthy of Elkarte?
My initial thought is to compare an average of likes (total topic likes/total topic posts) to the highest liked post in the topic. So that the stats doesn't actually measure the "most liked topic" based on greatest quantity of stats, but on how much the topic overall is liked in comparison to the single most liked post in that topic. That would discards the outliers (500 people suddenly like a post and it propels it to the top for a solid year) and let the topics be compared on a fairer metric.
But average topic likes/highest liked topic post is still going to have the original problem, just less pronounced. So maybe we want the Most Liked (Active) Topic, whether this is overt or not.
[ (totalTopicLikes/totalTopicPosts) - (daysSinceLastPost) ] / highestLikedPost
Or what if we penalize topics that reach/breach 1.0 (meaning that they're a single post topic with a ton of likes, or the topic has a crazy group of fans that likes every post religiously). Honestly, I'm not sure what the best way to do this is, maybe a log function? But it would have to be manipulating artificially so that the log function was acting on a number greater than 1, otherwise you start getting the reverse expectation. Or you simply take the original equation, log it by base 10, and take the absolute value, lower is better. Maybe:
abs( log( [(totalTopicLikes/totalTopicPosts) / highestLikedPost] ) )
Honestly, I haven't put a lot of deep thought into any of this, this is just musing on it tonight. I did a few fake number calculations on the side just to see what it would look like, and I think this is a decent naive implementation. Depends on what you're looking for and how fair you want to make it, though.