Topic: Change how "activity" is calculated - page 2. (Read 1639 times)

Of course nothing stops people from filling the forum with junk but the activity counter is capped to an increase of 14 every two weeks, thus it doesn't inflate as quickly as a mere post count. You can make 10 junk posts a day totaling 140 posts in two weeks, yet your activity increase is limited.

So your reply doesn't make sense, because obviously any reply contributes to raising the activity. You just need to keep posting garbage each week, which is very easy to do so and makes the activity metric irrelevant.

Please read your quoted text, then my answer.

If after doing that it's still unclear, well, you're talking about replies increasing the activity.

No what ? They who ?

Anyway, if you post trash during a whole year the activity will still increase.

No they don't.

The activity is the minimum of two values, one of them being the post count and the other is time-based. If you post a lot, the minimum will usually be the time-based one.

I'm not claiming this to be a perfect method, neither suggesting there is a perfect one. These simple rules will at least make people read rules about how the activity works, and then put a little more effort into their spamming replies. I do believe this helps the situation, it does not avoid it.

EDIT: lulz roflmao

lulz

Serious: No method is perfect. In my opinion, making the activity system more complicated just makes it easier to cheat it. The more rules there are, the more ways there are to get around them.

Hey meta-people. So I was wondering about this "activity" you show for each user based on the amount of posts combined with the post frequency over weeks since registration, and other details I'm possibly forgetting right now.

My issue with this metric is that it is completely irrelevant, I see users posting replies like "lol, right", "me too", "hi", "you're welcome", and so on. Which are fully useless, add nothing to the topic, yet increases the activity. I can imaginate a couple of reasons of why people do that, like being close to 10 years old, raising activity in accounts for selling them so other people can promote their services with sock puppets, or getting a higher rank. I have no hope for the first situation, this requires a nation-wide re-education which this forum cannot handle.

The other situations can be partially handled by simple rules, a more advanced system would apply some form of NLP. Would it be possible to not count towards activity replies with less than 5 words ? Maybe even reduce the activity when that occurs. People reported as trolls and such should never have their activity increased until they stop trolling. You could also take a dict and only count the words in a reply that appear in that dict, if it is below 5, then it cannot count towards activity either.

This bothers me because legitimate "hero members" and others are negatively affected by this kind of people.