An understandable explanation of 'Top'?

[icaria36]

Hi, there are several topics asking for the Top calculation and in all of them the answer provided is a link to discourse/top_topic.rb at ee36382640560191a8a43e87b607ef00051e019b · discourse/discourse · GitHub

This is of course the most precise and correct answer possible, but… could someone volunteer a non-dev-human-readable explanation? Or maybe it exists and it could be added here? For instance, “Top is calculated based on likes on the first post, likes on the rest of comments, number of replies and number of views” (no idea how true is this because I didn’t have the patience to go line by line through the source code.

[SaraDev (Sara Devlaeminck)]

Hi Quim,

Thanks for reaching out.

I just posted a reference guide on How “Top” Topics are Calculated that should answer any questions you have about how Discourse decides which topics are considered “Top”.

In summary:

@SaraDev

The calculation for the “Top Score” is as follows:

1. Pull the following values from the site settings:

• top topics formula log views multiplier
• top topics formula first post likes multiplier
• top topics formula least likes per post multiplier

2. Calculate a top score for each topic by adding together the following:

• Number of views each topic has for the selected period multiplied by the top topics formula log views multiplier
• Number of likes on the original post of the topic multiplied by the top topics formula first post likes multiplier
• The lesser of:
  • The Number of likes on the topic divided by the number of posts of the topic (the average number of likes per post)
  • The top topics formula least likes per post multiplier value
• IF the period has less than 10 posts then: 0 - ((10 - number of posts in the topic) / 20) * number of likes on the original post
  • Else - 10
• The number of posts on the topic

I hope this helps!