From: jm <jeffm@...>
Date: 2005-05-10T10:06:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Stats comp.lang.ruby (last 7 days)


On 09/05/2005, at 7:46 PM, David A. Black wrote:
> Please, let's not get into the judging, ranking, hierarchy, scoring
> thing.  The lack of that kind of stratification continues to be one of
> the great attractions of Ruby for me.  Let's leave that to Slashdot
> and Perlmonks and other such sites.
>

Two rules for stats and rankings,

1) Always take with a large gain of salt.
2) Always make them so complicate that no-one fully understands them 
and they end up being useless and not open to manipulation.

Anyway, such a system shouldn't be used to stratify anything (I agree 
that would only cause problems), but merely as an assistant to finding 
useful information faster. Most likely it's my bad choice of words 
striking again. I shouldn't have used 'score' or 'rank'. I thought 
these would have been taken to be in the sense of google's page rank or 
similar systems used as a sieve on the information. Not as a ranking 
like a leader board for sports. The intention was actually the reverse, 
too de-order the statistics by adding in/providing different measures, 
hence why I "leave it to someone else's imagination as to what 
constitutes fit". I got a little carried away with carrying it to its 
logical conclusion. Not always a good idea as that which is good in 
moderation can become a bad idea when taken to the extreme.

other random ideas,

number of posts that contain code
lines of code per post
posts that contain explainations
number of "long" theads
number of "short" threads
number of replies/references to message
maximum quote depth in message
post of summaries

Guaranteed as soon as I hit send I'll think of 5 more.

J.