How are the BBS "Top" threads ordered?

[SamSam]

@codinghorror I clicked on the Top button on the BBS, and was confused to see my own post at the top. I assumed that it was because I was logged in, and it weighted that for me, for whatever reason, but logged out and through a VPN it still shows my thread as the top thread for the year, even though it has had a fraction of the views and replies of other threads, and has not been active recently, especially compared to the next one down.

It makes me feel like I can’t rely on its sorting to find out what people are talking about on the BBS.

[codinghorror]

Likes to the first post are weighted heavily in top, more than general likes to the rest of the posts in the topic. You can ask @sam why that is

[SamSam]

D’oh, just realized that the top few in that list are, indeed, ordered by likes on the parent post.

Even if that’s an interesting metric, it was completely counter to my expectations, I guess as I’m used to systems like Reddit that also weigh the level of activity in the thread. (Number of replies, number of likes in the replies, recentness of the replies.)

Should there be another sorting mechanism (maybe Hotness?) to find those threads?

(Sorry, I’m sure many people have been over this discussion many times.)

[codinghorror]

That is already one factor among many, but @sam really amped the weighting of likes to the first post. He was quite adamant about this point.