The discussion revolves around whether Discourse resets admin settings on rebuild. Jonathan5 noticed that some variables were reset after rebuilding, but Falco claims that Discourse does not reset any site settings on rebuild.
It was later discovered by ClawdiaWolf that the automatic topic heat values setting was enabled, which adjusts topic heat values based on site activity. Jonathan5 and ClawdiaWolf both reported that this setting resulted in overly ambitious values for their forums.
The discussion concludes with Jonathan5 turning off the automatic adjustment option and suggesting that the setting descriptions be updated to alert users that their settings will be overridden unless they unset the automatic option.
After rebuilding from 2.9.0beta5 to 2.9.0beta7 I noticed that some variables were reset: topic views heat low, topic views heat medium, and topic views heat high.
I can find no record on my forum of these having been changed.
How odd. I’d recently set them quite low (in the hundreds) but today they were something like 1000, 2000 and 3500. Maybe I should rebuild Discourse and see what happens.
Do you happen to have the automatic topic heat values setting enabled, which is the default? If so as the description says it will adjust them based on site activity.
Same on one of my forums. It’s a login required forum with around 30 users and it chose settings not too far off from the ones you reported so I ended up turning it off.
On a really large forum I’m a staff member on the automatic adjustment does a lot better at setting reasonable values.