General Hot topics

[Arantor]

So several forums have the ability to flag that certain topics are “hot” (basically above a certain number of replies)

Is this an interesting feature to you?

 

[Kennysplash]

Of course, interesting topics are topics that have captured the members attention. The moment everyone is having a say in the topic, the admin can term it hot.

 

[Arantor]

I explicitly do not mean that.

I explicitly mean when the forum tags a topic “hot” because it’s got more than a set number of replies. No matter how old those replies are.

 

[Empire]

I never seen a HOT HOT topic yet that's SUPER hot on other yes

 

[Arantor]

SMF used to declare hot topics at 15 posts and very hot topics at 25 posts.

 

[Darth Cognus]

It's interesting to see what is considered as hot. As already mentioned there's hot after set replies, which I guess means 'long lived' but not actually hot unless it's maybe magma stream hot (calling it 'lava' instead might be fun...). It's also relative to how well a community is popping off, brand new hot looks different from AJ hot which looks different to a board in its high of several new pages appearing per day. So it's interesting to see how it's implemented regarding that, if it can scale at all. But I tend to go with my own viewing of hot, which is a thread with relatively high numbers and keeps appearing on a new posts skim in a short period.

Rarely does an automatic flag do this justice and so the feature means little in terms of what is really popping off. The best metric would probably be replies in x period of time, the spikes caused when the thread goes beyond just people leaving their 2c and when two or more users actually find something to engage over. If the feature can capture that it's done its job. But if it's something like above after relatively low post caps without a time qualifier, then it's just amusing. I haven't seen this feature used a lot in the first place to be honest but it's never done much for me when I have. I'd welcome a nuanced example closer to what I describe.

 

[Arantor]

Discourse tried it for a bit but couldn’t find a suitable curve that really described what a hot topic looked like, especially during its cooling-down period.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Generally speaking if a topic has x amount of replies, even if they're not high quality responses a thread will be tagged as a hot thread. I do get intrigued and will open up a thread that has the "hot" logo next to it just to see what people are talking about. If I can come up with a decent post, I'll reply to the thread. If there's not much going on in the thread, I'll just move on.

 

[Cedric]

gonna keep it short so might extend later.

The way I see it:
- Hot topics has more than x amount replies
- Trending topics are based on views and engagement in a set time. Can go up and down a ranking

 

[Cory]

I think the icon used for the topic can help express that it's a topic of interest to more users than some topics, but I don't see it as a total necessity to have. Just looking at the number of replies a topic has can help determine if the topic is "hot" or not, but of course, a visually appealing icon may help represent that even better.

 

[Empire]

SMF used to declare hot topics at 15 posts and very hot topics at 25 posts.

well, with most software you can edit the numbers to say get hot at 50 or more or less, 15 is nothing however it can get a very hot topic if it gets so many replies at once in a short space of time.

 

[Arantor]

With SMF you could do that too. I just saw the entire feature as utterly pointless.