Better Activity Determination

[keitharm]

Since AbrarSyed has decided to come back to the forums, that brought to my attention it makes it very difficult for them to ever make it back to their actual now current position. (Rank 67 | 0.69% activity)

What I propose is to make the activity percentage depend on their login status for the last X days (possibly 50 or 100) as a better determination of their current activity on the forums.

[joshsweaney]

I didn't think we ranked them based on activity. We rank based on logins (each login gets 5 points), so if they haven't logged in for ages then they're going to be behind, and there's no way we can really change that.

Plus, it comes back to the problem we originally had with the ranks remaining static if we tracked from the beginning of time. Now that a couple of months have passed we have the same problem - the rank are no longer changing again.

Possible Solution

Instead of assigning points, we base ranking on how much they post, compared to how often they login, and how we compare how much they post, compared to how long their account is active etc. I think the point system is what's to blame, rather than anything else. Because once everybody gets a head start on you with points, there's no way you can get ahead.

Ask on forums

I think we should link this issue in the forums and see what other people think about it. I know many were interested in refining an algorithm for the fun of it. Perhaps others might also agree that an algorithm that doesn't use points will be better (or maybe come up with something else entirely!)

[keitharm]

The way activity works is as long as they log on once per day, then they will have 100% activity.

Their score is then determined by activity % * total points that they have earned.

I think that if we made activity based on how much percent of the last 100 days you logged in, it would help give a better representation of the current activity of a user. Basically, kind of like why we started off with a base and calculated scores off of that without taking the past 3 years of posts and reputation into account.

This would give user's (such as AbrarSyed) a chance to make it up the leaderboards and would also help lower the rank of user's that rarely log in anymore and are therefore not currently contributing like they had been in the past.

But yeah, we could ask on the forums as well. See what more input the community has on the algorithm.

[joshsweaney]

Yep, I think activity is what needs to change. The ( activity * points ), is a good system for balancing out previous points, we just need to work on a good activity indicator. I'm not 100% sure about the "past 100 days" idea though.

I've had an idea where it would still be based on the past say, 100 days, but we also assign points to activity (this would need to be calculated daily, and might take some time), but basically, you get 100 points if you logged in today, 99 points if you logged in yesterday, 98 points two days ago, etc. etc.

These points would then be updated after each daily crawl in a separate "activity" table. An activity percent would still be calculated based on the total number of points you could achieve if you logged in everyday for 100 days straight (100 + 99 + 98 ... + 1).

This would mean that people that logged in recently would have a higher activity than others, but it would still take a but of time for new comers to "build up" some activity.

[joshsweaney]

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Actually, maybe it would be a good idea if you did the past 30 days with my idea or something. That way it could be on a "month to month" basis (like our status update bot), and the leaderboards might be a bit more fluid.

[keitharm]

Oooo, I like the sound of that! Great idea!