We introduced a new feature on Our Thoughts. All posts are now assigned a popularity rating, which is located next to the author and date posted information.
Popularity is determined by analysing several elements of a post. For example, it checks to see how many times a post has been viewed, how many comments it has, how many people have linked to it, and so forth.
We also have our ten most popular posts listed in the sidebar. Over time, this will show more accurately how popular a post is than comments or views could alone. As a result, we scrapped the comments and views lists.
Is this a feature of WordPress?
It’s a third-party WordPress plugin (plus a bit of tweaking).
Is it possible to change the algorithm to reward different activity or content?
I can assign different values to each criterion. For example, if I thought comments were a better indicator of popularity than links from other blogs, I could give comments a value of 100 and trackbacks a value of 50.
Interesting, so what does the % value represent? Could more than one thread get to 100% or is each a % of all total posts / threads?
I’m not sure. I’ll have to research that out. I know it’s not a percentage of all posts because the Elders and High Priests thread is at 100%.
Turns out that the value represent what percentage of the most popular post’s popularity each post has.
For example, as I write this comment, the Elders and High Priests post is the most popular, so it is used as the benchmark. Its popularity is 100% of the benchmark (since it is itself). The current post we’re discussing has only 9% of that popularity.
Theoretically then, the only way more than one post has the same percentage is if all the values they each have comes to the same total.