FAQ for those who migrated from the vBulletin version of LFGSS

I don't think links opening in a new tab should be the default behaviour because it would surprise the majority of users.

What logic is used in the trending section?

I see no reason why this should be "trending"

http://www.lfgss.com/conversations/253079

What logic is used in the trending section?

Newton's Law of Cooling.

A score (heat) is assigned based on number of comments in the past fortnight, this is then cooled by the exponent of the age of the thread and the total number of comments.

The present cooling rate prefers new items too much. There is a balancing act we've not yet mastered in getting the right cooling rate for small sites, as well as large sites.

The variables in the equation will be tweaked, but we then need to observe them for a few days before tweaking again.

You can visually see it here:
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/NewtonsLawOfCooling/

Posts start with a high temperature (score) when initially posted... and then rapidly cool towards an equilibrium.

New comments effectively raise the temperature... time lowers it (quickly at first, then slower). The more new comments the higher the temperature.

The short answer: As the heat is calculated in proportion to the total number of comments a conversation has, presently new threads are being given a higher initial heat.

This is the standard way to calculate trending items on sites. But... each site has to tailor the variables involved to ensure that the cooling rate reflects the content that site has... and that's the time consuming art of tweaking.

Magnets

FTFY.

Magnets

FTFY.

#rep

^Most common thing people seem to miss is Rep. I miss it too.

Was thinking it would be good to be able to order search results by date, and to have the option of searching only posts or only thread titles.

There's alot I used to use on the statistics page I miss too, "View all posts by {username}" was a good way of finding a conversation, or a part of a conversation. Also, "view all threads started by..." was similarly useful, a quick way to find old sales threads for reference.

there used to be info on a user when they started a sales thread– their location, how long they had been on the forum, and their rep category, all of which I found useful in judging if I wanted to make a purchase. With A new, neg repped member you might be more cautious, or if you didnt want to worry about postage you could filter out things too far away.

^ link for posts created:
http://www.lfgss.com/search?type=conversation&authorId=64610
& comments:
http://www.lfgss.com/search?type=comment&authorId=64610

Both still on the user page

Thanks, Sorry if that was explained before.

What's all this offset lark? I keep finding myself clicking on a forum/topic in my Following page and expecting to go to the most recent post, then it bounces up to the top of that page, then I scroll down, then it bounces up again and repeat as though the page keeps reloading when I scroll down. I have to catch the browser mid load and cancel it to get to the bottom of the page.
Firefox 31.0

In fact it doesn't even have to have offset in the url. I'm getting it even on the Following page. Page just keeps reloading and arriving at the top when I scroll down.

Sign out. Sign back in.

That old chestnut. Ta

Aren't you factoring in views? Some topics might not have that many replies but still be viewed a lot, or are these things usually proportional?

His are threads with new comments tagged? Is there a search querry that I can add so that a search only returns threads with new comments?

They are roughly proportional.

Not yet. The "has_unread" function seems to struggle on the 6 million items in the comments table... there are ways to do this so that it can work, but we didn't discover the slowdown until a little while ago. Not enough to fix it before we had to go live.

Is that M favicon going?

Cool, thought it might be a way to recreate the Today's posts page, but if it's on your radar anyway then I'll just wait for it to be done right :)

I remember discussing algorithms when I came in for testing. Are you sure exponential is what you want? Not that I have any complaints but was wondering what the justification was for that shape of function?

It keeps trending items on the page for a short while (a couple of hours), and then allows them to plummet off the list if they are not being posted to.

Seriously... it's how trending is done.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11653545/hot-content-algorithm-score-with-time-decay

I keep thinking I've opened up an article in the Metro once I've switched tabs.

"Meh, close that. Right, where is LFGSS? Oh, it's gone."

(assuming I haven't already accidentally closed the relevant tab because target="_blank" for external links is evil, obvs)

Ah, cheers.

Is it possible to limit search to classifieds only?

Is it possible to limit search to classifieds only?

Not this second.

But within a week yes... though best with a bookmark.

And when we have the classifieds "type" of post, then yes with ease.

I've started getting that page refreshing constantly thing. All was fine till about 10.30 last night. Wa something changed round about then?

If I log out and then log back in again it stops. But I don't really want to do that every day.

Is there anything I can do? As far as I am aware the email address I log in with is the same one that you should have on record.