The algorithm is (Views/Age) + (Replies/Age), where views and replies are absolute numbers and age is minutes since creation. Developer posts gain no special weighting. Also the list update is currently paused while we optimize the query behind it, so any calculation that you manually perform at this moment is likely outdated and will deliver results that do not match what you currently see.
Thanks for explaining how it works.
Though it does seem to make it so that mainly new threads can trend, whereas a long thread for some popular mod can't ever get to trend as it was created long ago and already has lots of posts, so even if it gets 1000 new posts in a single day and who knows how many views due to a new version releasing, then it won't get to start trending.
Perhaps it'd be better to have it be relative age of posts/views? Though not sure if you're able to track views like that.
By what I mean by relative age then it'd be that the longer ago a post/view was made the less it matters in the ranking and hence any thread, no matter how old and large, which gets 1000 posts in a single day would end up trending.
Speaking of views and posts would it then be possible to have the subforums/unread thread page show the total view count and total post count again? Atm it's rounded to whole thousand/million which does feel like a downgrade as it was nice to be able to see the total numbers.
In the same vein then I'd really love to get back the thing where you can see at the bottom of a thread page how many posts are ahead of you in the thread. Similarly a small count at the top stating that you're viewing posts x to x+19 out of y, where x is the post number of the first post on the page and y is the total post count.
We used to have that too and it was quite useful. I've found myself missing it many times since the upgrade.
