Discourse Hot Topics

[joebuhlig]

Discourse now features a /hot topic list in core that can be added to your top menu

Repository: GitHub - danskdynamit/discourse-hot-topics

This plugin creates a “Hot” sorting criteria and builds a custom topic list based on the result of the following formula:

likes / ((hours since creation + 2) ^ gravity)

Things to note:

• The default gravity multiplier is 1.5 but you can adjust this in the settings for the plugin.
• You can add “hot” to the list of menu items to make it easier to access.
• There is also the option to add ?order=hot to a URL to create your own links.
• Once enabled, the hot rating is recalculated every 30 minutes so it will take a bit of time to take effect at first. If you want to accelerate this, you can log in to Sidekiq and manually trigger the HotRating job.

This work was graciously sponsored by @commonpawn and @Oskar. Kudos to them for making this happen.

The following topics lend more background to why this exists:

Wanted: Hot sorting criteria for front-page

Following up on this thread from last year. We would like to use a sorting criteria as Hacker News to make sure we’re always serving the most popular content to our users. We’re imagining using a similar algorithm to the one used on Hacker News. [image] [image] Basically it should sort all topics on our forum on the front-page after this criteria - so you can keep scrolling forever. (Unlike top topics in Discourse today, which is limited to a pre-set number of topics within a time range) W…

Wanted: Discourse Hacker News Plugin

We worked with @joebuhlig to try implement the voting buttons on the front page - but it turned out it was not as easy as we thought. So we’ve put that on ice for now. So the plan for our site is to use plugin, Topic Previews, to display a like button on the front-page and we’re currently working with @joebuhlig on building a ‘hot topics page’ which is using a similar algorithm as Hackernews to sort topics. It should be done very soon and released on Github when ready. Below how we plan to imp…

https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-list-previews/41630/299

[Mans]

In our community, we need hottest topic for a specific category. can this plugin do that?

[joebuhlig]

Yes.

Go to the category page you want and then select Hot from the menu. The URL will look similar to this: yourdomain.com/c/CATEGORY/l/hot.

[kam44]

Hello @joebuhlig,

Is it possible to change the frequence of the HotRating job in sidekiq ?

[joebuhlig]

Give this a try:

https://github.com/danskdynamit/discourse-hot-topics/commit/c13c1a6857146d532be4c124c0841791243b424c

It adds a setting hot_topics_calc_period that lets you set the period (in minutes). Note that you’ll need to do a rebuild every time this setting is changed before it will take effect.

[kam44]

Thank you @joebuhlig !

[kam44]

Hello Joe,

Is the “staff like weight” parameter is taken into account in the hot topic plugin ?

This option is in the parameters “other” tab.

[joebuhlig]

Currently, it is not.

[kam44]

Hello @joebuhlig,

After some tests, i’m pretty sure that replies likes, are taken into account in the formula. I think it’ll be better and more logical, to only takes likes of the first post.

Don’t you think ?

[joebuhlig]

@kam44

i’m pretty sure that replies likes, are taken into account in the formula.

Yes. It does count likes on all posts. It’s beyond me on whether or not that’s a good way to do it. The formula is a copy from other models. @commonpawn and @Oskar, do either of you have a strong leaning here?

[kam44]

@joebuhlig if you have a bit time and if @commonpawn and @Oskar are ok, i can sponsorize this job, to add an option to take or not in account replies likes.

[joebuhlig]

@kam44

i can sponsorize this job, to add an option to take or not in account replies likes

Just sent you a PM.

[joebuhlig]

Sometimes things work out really quick. Thanks to @kam44 for making this happen.

You can now choose to use only the likes on the original post in the calculation as opposed to likes across all replies.

https://github.com/danskdynamit/discourse-hot-topics/commit/fcb645064cbea9ff2bc06099f730541c01259773

[pmusaraj (Penar Musaraj)]

The plugin works well, but does it do the “x new posts. Click to refresh” live updating that is done on the core lists? It would be nice if it could (not so much to change the order of the posts, but to notify the users as to which posts have replies…)

[skozz (Raúl M.)]

I’m getting a 500 (/hot route) error after installing it and I’ve run the HotRating job, I’m missing something?

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Regarding this:

@erlend_sh

As it stands, the Top view doesn’t actually work, since it’s still based on Likes and other metrics. To avoid confusion, it’d probably be best if a voting-category excluded Top entirely, and instead showed “Most voted”, simply showing the most voted ideas in descending order, like on UserVoice.

Do you think Hot Topics could be made to support Feature Voting as well? Or would it be easier if Feature Voting just comes with its own concept of “Hot” sorting?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

I see no reason for a cascade of dependency, feature voting can take care of itself

[randallcoding]

Ran into an error with this plugin.

I added the plugin to the plugins folder in discourse then started up my rails server with bundle exec rails server and ran into this error. Only this plugin has yielded any errors like this.

1: from …/plugins/discourse-hot-topics/plugin.rb:98:in block in activate!' .../plugins/discourse-hot-topics/plugin.rb:100:in module:Jobs’: uninitialized constant Jobs:: Jobs::Scheduled
Did you mean? Scheduler (NameError)

** INCOMPATIBLE PLUGIN **

I’m new to discourse so perhaps I’m making some fatal mistake? or is anyone else having this same issue.

I’m using Ruby 2.6.1 and Rails 6.0.0, latest version of discourse from Github.

[hyd504]

Change

class HotRating < Jobs::Scheduled

to

class HotRating < Scheduled

This worked for me. I believe the issue happens because this class is already wrapped inside module ::Jobs so we don’t have to specify the module again.