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In lugnet.admin.general, Dan Boger writes:
> In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
> where in here does it take into account how many people are in the group?
Implicitly in the n variable; nowhere explicitly.
> Can you weigh in the number of people who are subscribed to that group?
> Since they are the ones most likely to vote/notice posts to it... ?
Well, it's nearly impossible to know the number of people subscribed to a
given group, and it's even more impossible to know how many people have read
and understood a given message.
It is possible to guess at relative frequences, but fortunately, the size of
the group doesn't actually matter for this purpose. For purposes of article
ranking, all that really matters is the number of votes tallied, as this is
the cleanest indicator of the number of people who have read and understood
(or viewed) a message and felt it was important enough to vote on (one way or
the other). Thus "the group" is self-selected, and lower-traffic areas will
have slightly (but not much) lower ratings -- which is a Good Thing -- because
the purpose of the these ratings in the first place is to rate the import of
an article for the average reader. Things with higher appeal to an average
reader will have more readers, and slightly higher scores (but not unreasonably
so) than things with lesser appeal to an average reader. Think "Spotlight"
above a certain threshold. The purpose of the "Spotlight" page is to highlight
cool general-interest and super-cool special-interest stuff. But the special-
interest stuff has to be super-cool (not just cool) in order to make the cut,
otherwise it would be flooded. "Top N" lists in sub-groups would also be a
great way to focus in on special-interest stuff, since this is a shortcoming
of the one-size-fits-all [sic] "Spotlight" feature.
> Also, (Jenn asks, and I forget if you mentioned this before), will it be
> possible to vote through the news/mail interface?
Definitely not through a newsreader unless someone writes themselves an
extension (easy in emacs?, probably a lot harder in other newsreaders) for
their newsreader.
Possibly maybe later through SMTP, but initially only through HTTP. I don't
think it'll take too many active participants before it begins to have a
positive effect. (We'll see! :-)
--Todd
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Article scoring
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| (...) That was (almost) my first question/concern, as well. (...) Hmm. I'd like to see something available, at least through SMTP, assuming users-of-newsreaders could vote by forwarding messages to one (or more) vote-accounts. Then again, I haven't (...) (25 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Article scoring
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| In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes: [snip a lot of math] (...) where in here does it take into account how many people are in the group? Can you weigh in the number of people who are subscribed to that group? Since they are the ones most (...) (25 years ago, 6-Mar-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
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