Hi Langdon and DPC browsers,
When browsing images on the site, you can select the sort order on the left. We have recently uploaded, we have highest rated, but we don't have "the best of the recent uploads". The "Highest Rated" page is very stagnant, and you don't get the best photos with "Most Recent".
I propose a new sort order based on a mix of photo age and score. It'll take a bit of tweaking of the algorithm to get the best results, but something along the lines of (in pseudo-SQL):
SELECT ... ORDER BY (POW(score,2)-(age_in_days/7)) DESC;
This way you see a mix of the best ranking, recent challenge entries. A 0-week old score of 5.5 is ranked alongside a 5-week old 6.0 and a 18-week old 7.0. Of course, last week's 7.0 comes in ahead of all of those. But last year's 8.0 is below them.
In this way, we have a sort order that favors both high-scoring shots and recent entries, keeping it fresh and interesting.
If you feel that running this calculation in real-time would put a strain on the DB (and it probably would), you can calculate this value each night, save it in a column, index the column, and sort on that column. And since I know UI is the hardest part of any new feature - all it is is a single link.
Cheers,
-Jeff
Message edited by author 2008-10-01 09:12:49. |