Keeping a median or mode of post times with the topic will be an indicator on how recent this topic is. Doing it on the last [n] posts will be a measure of how fresh the topic.
In addition to category up/down bumps, sort by freshness.
A much-linked topic may not be fresh at all. Just very relevant during a particular period of time in history. Other than faq’s ans howto’s, which can simply be bumped.
@tgxworld has done A LOT recently to improve the story here.
Including:
Smarter indexing (we clean up a lot of previous mess that used to live in indexes)
Per category search weights
Smarter relevance scoring (that takes into account the length of posts better)
and more…
So for the OP here we used to have:
We now have:
I find the new results a lot better.
We are not 100% done with the OP, it may make sense to do per-topic priority at some point and allow mods to promote topics.
But … instead of carrying this topic open for more years I feel we can close this off for now.
@tgxworld will do a writeup about the new admin knobs once he is done.
