# Hot topics this quarter/month/week/today
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [April 13, 2016, 7:07pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520 "2016-04-13T19:07:08Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@commonpawn](https://meta.discourse.org/u/commonpawn)
#### Post date: [April 13, 2016, 7:07pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/1 "2016-04-13T19:07:08Z")
It would be great to have a the ability to have a 'Hot topic / Popular topic/ filter on the front page in addition to the existing Top Topics filter.
**What**
Right now there are only two ways to discover content on a Discourse Forum:
- Where there has been activity recently
- Topics **created within X** timeframe that are popular
we need a 3rd potential way to organize the topic list
- Topics that were **most popular within X timeframe**
**Why**
Top topics is great, but **what about topics created over, say a week ago, but are the ‘hottest’ topics of the week**? They don’t show up in the top views and since the ‘latest’ view changes 10x a day they don’t get a prominent spot there.
On our site, we have a lot of once-a-week visitors and we would love to have a default view on the homepage on ‘Hot topics this week’ so people can follow where the most activity has been going on this week (views, likes, comments, clicking on links, etc).
Imagine you visit [meta.discourse.com](http://meta.discourse.com) on a weekly or bi-weekly basis - the last few weeks, the “Discourse Feature Voting” topic has been one of the most active topics on this forum. However, it will not show up if i click top posts this week. I might even miss it on the"Latest" view if i am lucky and visit on a time when other topics just received comments.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 12:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/2 "2016-04-14T00:02:13Z")
Perhaps, but without regular activity, any site is long term dead anyway. This is something you want to encourage, rather than zombie-raising older topics.
It seems like an awfully subtle distinction on activity time vs. creation time, particularly when the vast majority of topics are active after creation time and then rapidly trail off over time.
And, a much easier fix is to simply broaden the time window.
---
### Author:  [@commonpawn](https://meta.discourse.org/u/commonpawn)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 12:12am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/3 "2016-04-14T00:12:06Z")
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> Perhaps, but without regular activity, any site is long term dead anyway. This is something you want to encourage, rather than zombie-raising older topics.
We want the default landing page sorting criteria to show “popular topics” the past week rather than topics with recent activity. However, a lot of valuable activity is happening in threads that have been created over a week ago, but continue to be highly active. So we want a view that allows us to surface what topics were most popular the past week - and not necessarily _created_ the past week.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 12:14am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/4 "2016-04-14T00:14:41Z")
As I said, it’s quite unusual to have continually active topics long after the creation date. And the topics that exhibit this tendency may have other characteristics, such as being chat-like or GTKY (getting to know you).
So it’s a big change, first of all, and second, we’d be optimizing for what I consider to be an unusual, corner case that would not help the majority of sites.
Just unlikely to happen in the near term.
Besides, anything active will get bounced to `/latest` – why don’t you just make that the default if that’s what you want? And that’s why it _is_ the default, in Discourse…
---
### Author:  [@commonpawn](https://meta.discourse.org/u/commonpawn)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 12:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/5 "2016-04-14T00:20:59Z")
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> As I said, it’s quite unusual to have continually active topics long after the creation date. And the topics that exhibit this tendency may have other characteristics, such as being chat-like or GTKY (getting to know you)
A lot of the topics i see in [/top/quarterly](https://meta.discourse.org/top/quarterly) on Discourse are still highly active 😉
The reason for having a _/popular_ view as a default landing page is because we want to serve our new users the best/most popular content first and let the regulars navigate to _/latest_ themselves.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 12:22am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/6 "2016-04-14T00:22:56Z")
That’s fine, but this hybrid view does not exist, and would be difficult to build. It is not on our roadmap in any form at the moment.
- the existing default homepage of `/latest` works for 95% of sites
- `/top` is only a click away
- new and long-absent users are sent to `/top` by default so they can see the “best” stuff on arrival as a new (never been here before) or long-absent (I haven’t been here in ages) user.
---
### Author:  [@cpradio](https://meta.discourse.org/u/cpradio)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 12:34am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/7 "2016-04-14T00:34:55Z")
You can set /top to be the homepage. You simply make it the first item in the menu, and there is a defaul top time period setting that you can set to weekly, monthly, quarterly, and it will be reflected on the homepage instead of the default yearly.
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### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 2:08am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/8 "2016-04-14T02:08:23Z")
Yes, but top has date cutoffs, based on the date of topic creation, and he wants it to be based on date of activity exclusively.
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### Author:  [@commonpawn](https://meta.discourse.org/u/commonpawn)
#### Post date: [April 14, 2016, 4:24am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/9 "2016-04-14T04:24:55Z")
Yeah 🙂 we will go for Top for now, just wanted to call it out
Thanks!
---
### Author:  [@JonathanShaw](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JonathanShaw)
#### Post date: [November 16, 2020, 2:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/hot-topics-this-quarter-month-week-today/42520/10 "2020-11-16T14:43:37Z")
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> it’s quite unusual to have continually active topics long after the creation date … we’d be optimizing for what I consider to be an unusual, corner case that would not help the majority of sites.
Fair enough, but there is a significant category of sites that you probably care about that do benefit from something like this: collaboration sites.
If you’re engaged in building something together over time (software, an organisation, a movement) then there is often a huge gap between when an idea is first floated and when it is actually completed.
Part of the point of using something like Discourse as a collaboration platform is actually to facilitate the continuity of discussion over long gaps, rather than constantly restarting discussions from scratch.
The nice thing about collaboration as a market sector is that it is naturally linked to paying customers 😃
> [@codinghorror](#):
>
> So it’s a big change, first of all, and second,
I’m puzzled you think it’s a big change. Look at the code of the top topics model it would seem to involve only touching the compute\_top\_score\_for method. The line that is currently
```
if period == :all
// Get all the topics without filtering by topic.created
.....
// Build the query
DB.exec(sql, from: start_of(period))
```
would become something like
```
created_period = SiteSetting.top_topics_created_period
created_period = period if created_period == ''
if created_period == :all
// Get all the topics without filtering by topic.created
.....
// Build the query
DB.exec(sql, from: start_of(created_period))
```
I’m sure there would be a bit more too it than that, but it seemed like you thought the whole algorithm computation would need redoing.