Most popular topics

[LaxRef]

On the "Most popular topics" lists at the top of the main forums page, shouldn't there be some sort of exponential decay built in so that old threads with lots of posts but with little recent activity drift to the bottom? Otherwise, the Duke thread is going to be at the top of both lists for a long, long time even when no one is talking about it anymore.

Would something like exponential smoothing work here? Do something like:

NewAdjPostCt := 0.01 * (# of new posts in thread today) +
+ 0.99 * (Previous day's adjusted post count)

Thus, a thread like the Duke thread would stay near the top for a long time, but its AdjPostCt would slowly decline over time.

Yeah, I know, this is a lot more work than the current system.