[Forum] Popular Topic

[mous13]

What problem would you like to solve?
When a topic gets an x amount of interaction, a "Popular Topic" indicator is attached to the top right corner of the topic itself and on the topic listing as well.

Additional context
It'll display for a certain amount of time, until the topic itself is not getting many interactions then it'll disappear.

This could also tie in with a widget that'll display popular topics.

[jannes-io]

Little hazy on the requirements.

What is considered popular enough? What is X? How long is this period? etc, etc.

We already have a widget on the admin that gets topics sorted by an arbitrary "popularity score", which is some formula of comments * multiplier, views * multiplier, reactions * multiplier... but this widget does not take any security into consideration...

We could run some async messenger tasks that calculates 2 "popularity score"s for every topic (that had at least 1 comment in the last month or something so it remains scalable on huge/old forums) and stores it on the topic.

1. popularity score only counting interactions in the past 48 hours -- calculated every hour
2. popularity score forever -- calculated only once each day

That way it's pre-calculated and we can easily use with our existing secured queries and show it on our templates wherever we please.

We might have to collect a bit more data for this though:

• For reactions: a created_at date on comment_reactions,
• For views, we can have a secondary view counter that only counts the views since the last short-term popularity calculation? I really don't want to store a DB record for every single view (including guests)... That will not scale well at all...

What do you think?