OP Designation & Update (suggested new features)

RustyTrowel
Mon, 30 Jan 2017 18:35:17 +0000

There is a lot of gold in many threads from a couple years back. But how to get at that content in a way that doesn’t require moderator time to curate?

Caveat: this idea requires programming time and the ability to modify the code. But here goes:

1. Have the programmer add a variable to keep track of the total number of “likes” and “helpfuls” across all replies for a thread. This is a simple counter variable: someone hits “like” or “helpful” on a reply and it increments this counter for the thread by 1.

2. Once a month (or whenever) during a low utilization period, a program sorts the threads in each subforum high to low by this new counter variable. To make the problem easier, drop the tail (say, all threads with fewer than 10 “likes” + “helpfuls”). The sort program stores the most recent thread sort order for each subforum so it can be retrieved later. (It will be computationally too expensive to keep re-running any type of sorting in production on user request). So, computationally, assume it’s one sort per subforum per month to make it easy.

3. Change the UI to give the user the option of displaying the threads in the standard way (default) or “high-low by total liked+helpful.” If the user picks “high-low by total liked+helpful,” the system displays the threads in the subforum according to the canned sort output from step 2.

4. Some sort of thread auto-close feature (like the idea in #5 above) would have to also be implemented because people would be re-opening old threads left and right if they could easily see the most “liked”+“helpful” threads for each subforum.