Algorithm to determine thread "hotness"

Posted by nickf on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by nickf
Published on 2008-12-19T14:45:30Z Indexed on 2010/04/16 5:23 UTC
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I'm trying to come up with a way to determine how "hot" certain threads are in a forum. What criteria would you use and why? How would these come together to give a hotness score?

The criteria I'm thinking of include:

  • how many replies
  • how long since the last reply
  • average time between replies

The problems this algorithm must solve:

  • A thread which has 500 replies is clearly hot, unless the last reply was over a year ago.
  • A thread with 500 replies that was replied to a second ago is clearly hot, unless it's taken 4 years to reach 500 replies.
  • A thread with 15 replies in the last 4 minutes is really hot!

Any ideas, thoughts or complete solutions out there?

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