tell me about "Trending content" on forums page

[chazix]

Hope this won't be taken as any kind of criticism. I'm just curious. I have only just noticed the "Trending content" pane on the forums page.

Then I noticed that 4 out of the 5 threads listed in that pane had dates (which I take to be thread creation dates) of more than one year ago. Figured it was just that threads that were started long ago were receiving new posts, but there's at least one exception, 'What is the lamp for?', which showed up in the pane despite its last post being in 2011.

My second guess was that it is views (not posts) that determine whether a Thread shows up as Trending. But, meaning no disrespect, it seems unlikely that either humans or bots are viewing the heck out of that particular thread.

Maybe it's just a good old-fashioned bug? (Again, this isn't a complaint, and even if it is a bug I wouldn't vote for any attention to be paid to fixing it. FWIW, I'm viewing AK with Firefox on a Linux notebook.)

 

[Dswankey]

My initial thought based on the screen shot below was that it was for frequently posted threads such as

The myriad of "What are you listening to" threads that seem to get multiple posts a day on a consistent basis.

Then I noticed the vaguely titled thread @chazix mentioned from 15yr's ago that lasted a day. Interesting

 

[audiotemp]

https://xenforo.com/community/threads/trending-content.220649/

 

[chazix]

I managed to find the "What is the lamp for" in the DIY forum's thread list so I could see the view count. (Was there an easier way to get to the view count?) The view count was 16K, so way more than I expected, but a drop in the bucket compared to view counts of other entries in "Trending content".

OTOH, googling for "what is the lamp for site:audiokarma.org" does bring up that thread as the top result, so maybe that means it really is a hot topic.

Still not complaining, just amused by what seems like an oddity. I'm perfectly fine with the oddball thread staying in the Trending list forever. I like to think I don't follow trends very much anyway .

 

[islamtn]

Yeah, I noticed that too the other day—I'm browsing the forum, and suddenly I see a trending thread about some lamp that was trending before I even registered. So, I'm thinking, maybe someone resurrected an old thing, and the last post was from 2011. Seriously?

At first, I thought maybe some bots were boosting the views, but why would they? I doubt a lamp from 2011 has suddenly become all that attractive to the algorithms. It's more likely that the trending thing is just glitching. They probably have some kind of broken script counting activity, and old threads sometimes show up by mistake.

Honestly, I'm not even worried—the main page is fine anyway, and I just stopped noticing that section. But since you mentioned it, I'll keep an eye out now, maybe some other vintage ones will pop up.

 

[islamtn]

Yeah, I noticed that too the other day—I'm browsing the forum, and suddenly I see a trending thread about some lamp that was trending before I even registered. So, I'm thinking, maybe someone resurrected an old thing, and the last post was from 2011. Seriously?

At first, I thought maybe some bots were boosting the views, but why would they? I doubt a lamp from 2011 has suddenly become all that attractive to the algorithms. It's more likely that the trending thing is just glitching. They probably have some kind of broken script counting activity, and old threads sometimes show up by mistake.

Honestly, I'm not even worried—the main page is fine anyway, and I just stopped noticing that section. But since you mentioned it, I'll keep an eye out now, maybe some other vintage ones will pop up.

I think the lamp thread is just a classic forum ghost story at this point. It pops up every few years like it's haunting the place. My theory is that some older forum software just has a stroke when it calculates "trending" and a thread from 2011 somehow gets a random spike because some bot crawled it or some guy in a basement clicked it twenty times trying to figure out what lamp everyone was talking about.

What's funnier is that now lamp thread is going to get even more views because we're all in here discussing it. We're basically feeding the algorithm exactly what it wants. Next week it'll be number one trending and the cycle continues. I say we embrace it. Long live the lamp.