# How does "Summarize This Topic" actually work?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-does-summarize-this-topic-actually-work/212020
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [December 14, 2021, 2:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-does-summarize-this-topic-actually-work/212020 "2021-12-14T02:30:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![malatestas\_hat](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ecd19e/32.png) [@malatestas\_hat](https://meta.discourse.org/u/malatestas_hat)
#### Post date: [December 14, 2021, 2:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-does-summarize-this-topic-actually-work/212020/1 "2021-12-14T02:30:58Z")

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I’ve been searching for over 30 minutes on the Discourse Blog and on this forum for an explanation of how the “Summarize This Topic” decides what posts to show and I can’t find one.

[This](https://meta.discourse.org/t/feedback-improved-topic-summary-mode/11376) post explains how “Summarize This Topic” is an improved version of the old “best of” feature, which “algorithmically picks the ‘best’ posts in a topic,” but there’s no summary of what the algorithm values when it come to picking posts.

The topic of how “Summarize This Topic” came up in [this](https://meta.discourse.org/t/most-liked-messages-in-the-topic/38308) thread, but again no explanation of what’s under the hood was given.

So, what’s the algorithm behind “Summarize This Topic”? Does it select posts with more likes than some threshold? Posts with lots of replies? Some combination of both? I’m very curious.

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### Author: ![JammyDodger](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jammydodger/32/254611_2.png) [@JammyDodger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JammyDodger)
#### Post date: [December 14, 2021, 9:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-does-summarize-this-topic-actually-work/212020/2 "2021-12-14T09:23:47Z")

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It’s done on a scoring system. I think this post has the calculator in:

> [@Score. Score for a Post. How is this calculated?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/score-score-for-a-post-how-is-this-calculated/40295/3):
>
> As for how it’s calculated, everything is in the [ScoreCalculator](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/lib/score_calculator.rb) class wink