0 users marked this as a favorite April 4, 2007 4:29 PM   Subscribe

When I click on 'popular favorites', the number of favorites for each post is consistently wrong. I think the number I see corresponds with how many favorites the post had when I last clicked it. This question feels familiar to me - I think this has been discussed here before - but as I mentioned earlier, I have a difficult time searching for stuff here. If you want to point me to a previous discussion on this, feel free. Thanks.
posted by serazin to Bugs at 4:29 PM (9 comments total)

Oh, Firefox 1.5, OSX 10.4.
posted by serazin at 4:39 PM on April 4, 2007


It works off time-frames at the moment. So say something got posted three days ago and was liked by a lot of users, and it got marked a favorite like so:

Day 1: 12 favorites
Day 2: 4 favorites
Day 3 (today!): 6 favorites

On the last 24 hours of popular posts, I look back 24 hours in the favorites table and count stuff up. That post would say 6 favorites and be sorted near the bottom, but when you click through to it, there would be 22 favorites on the post, which is a total of all activity.

So the solution would seem to be that I still sort the lists based on what happened in the past 24 hours, but I need to make the counts reflect the total, so that post near the bottom would say 22 favorites.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:05 PM on April 4, 2007


Of course, the next metatalk post would ask why a list of popular favorites over the last 24 hours is all out of order with the number of favorites shown...
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:16 PM on April 4, 2007


You could display it with both values:

6 (of 22)
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:21 PM on April 4, 2007


Ok, it's been updated with real counts.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:30 PM on April 4, 2007


Thing is, many posts get favorited again by virtue of being on the favorites page. Nothing wrong with that, except they're already there, and it keeps new favorites (that otherwise might appear) off the page. It's like a back eddy. Why not select on the basis of each FPP's first 24 hours--i.e., one day after the time stamp on each FPP they get counted and sorted for the favorites page? Bump the old ones off the bottom. It would eliminate the toehold and be more equitable. You could write a program to do that, no?
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 5:39 PM on April 4, 2007


But then you'd miss mundane posts where something extraordinary happened at some point more than 24 hours after it was created (like the referenced person creating an account to state their reaction.)
posted by Rhomboid at 6:10 PM on April 4, 2007


Wow! Rapid response. Thank you!
posted by serazin at 6:20 PM on April 4, 2007


That's true, Rhomboid, but that's where human judgment and the sidebar come in.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 6:38 PM on April 4, 2007


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