Okay, I think this is the one. I think this is critical for BTCTalk 2.0 (or 3.0, I guess?)
Yep. Great idea. I'm still trying to find ways how this could be abused, but as long as I don't find any, this would be
second on my wishlist (right after API).
Have Weighted Thread Activity ("WTA") display next to threads, maybe color coded. WTA is displayed in percentage and is the cumulative activity score of unique users posting in thread, divided by 10,000.
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Beyond this, another positive impact can be made with "WTA (decaying)," a column where WTA is calculated normally, but with a 5% (nominal) per day decrease in a poster's WTA contribution since the day he originally posted. This is able to be abused, so once a user posts the first time, that original posting date should be stored by the forum server and unable to be changed, even if the user deletes his original post.
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WTA (decaying) can be used to find the threads recently most actively posted in by high-activity users, a relatively accurate (IMO) "what's hot?" I'd also suggest something similar to a "what's hot?" button in the main user toolbar, where the top 100 or so threads (by WTA (decaying)) are kept.
Why would you prefer the first post of a specific user in a thread for WTA? I'd rather use the last post of a user or just all of them. Imagine a necroed thread with High Activity Users (HAU
) which is mostly kept alive by newbies posting "Hi Mom" (you all know what thread I'm talking about). As soon as a few HAUs post there, it could probably safely be assumed to be interesting again, right? Probably I'm just missing something you've thought of
I'd imagine this would be very resource-intensive, so the dev should be careful about giving rough estimates over hard real-time statistics (for example, don't calculate WTA contributions by user more than once). This would effectively replace having to ban giveaway threads and help reduce the potential for scams (except, obviously, by high-activity members, whose threads would initially be given more credibility). Trust rating could act as a multiplier to someone's WTA contribution, but that seems like a clusterfuck waiting to happen.
The WTA decaying is definitely resource-hungry. But let's just recalculate the WTA (resource-hungry) whenever someone posts and store that value as a numeric value that's compared to the timestamp when you're displaying the list of threads. That's a static request with a simple numeric calculation, not at all resource-hungry.