Hi Nathan, nice to have a topic in common again. 
Knowing the background of the forums you manage, I have to ask if the topics are very focused on a single idea or can the topics be all over the place with many off-topic post.
The reason I ask is that while on some sites such as the ones related to your profession the users will tend to stay on topic but for other sites the users tend to consider a topic more like a discussion or chat on Discord and are all over the place.
When the post to the topic are on-topic, long and short have a much more understandable meaning but when many post are off-topic, what would that mean?
For me with many off-topic post in a topic I tend to think of the point cloud generated from the text used to find similarities in the post and then filter them down. With many post being on-topic the point cloud should be nicely concentrated but with many off-topic post you get many more point clouds that look like galaxies in the universe than one galaxy. Make sense?