New hot sorting!

Hey everyone!

This is MobiusScarf. Long-time pledger, first-time volunteer code monkey for FurryVNE.

If you're a regular user of FurryVNE like I am, you've probably noticed something odd about the "Hot" page that greets you when you browse the Cloud for a Character or Interaction. Specifically, that it's pretty much no different from the "New" page.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love the "New" page. Sometimes I just want to see the newest things you guys are cooking up. But I don't need two "New" pages. And now that we have a lot more creators producing a lot more content, it's getting harder and harder to stumble upon hidden gems that maybe were uploaded when I was busy with something else. So why not make the "Hot" page more of a showcase for those hidden gems? Surely, that's what it was meant to be to begin with!

Since I know odes can only be working on so many aspects of the system at once, and since I have some technical experience from my day-job, I volunteered to take a look under the hood to see if I could figure out what was wrong with the "Hotness" rankings.

After messing around with my own wacky ideas for a few days, we ultimately concluded that the problem wasn't really with the original algorithmic approach, but with the function weighing the scores in the algorithm. It was kind of working, but it was weighted as though we expected dozens (if not hundreds) of posts with hundreds (if not thousands) of votes on those posts every day.

Long story short: We'll ultimately just need to change four lines of code in one function and update the rankings throughout the system, and then the "Hot" page will function more like it ought to.

Which, of course, begs the question:

How Exactly Will It Function?

Posts prioritized by the reworked Hotness algorithm will follow these general guidelines:

• Generally added less than a month or two earlier.

• Must score a minimum of 5 to rank.

• Higher scoring posts stick around higher in the rankings longer, but scores reach a point of diminishing returns after around 3 months to keep things fresh

This means that the Hot page will begin to show a mix of new and old posts from the last few weeks with a range of scores between them.

And just to be clear, the New and Top pages will still be there, and they will still behave the same for when you just want to see the newest stuff or the highest ranking stuff. This change will only affect the ranking for the Hot page.

TL;DR - The Hot page ranking in the Cloud was broken, but we fixed it. Hope you like it!