The submission content on the site can be ordered one of two ways:
This is controlled on the options page using the “Use algorithm on homepage” setting. If this is set to “yes,” then the rating is used; if it is set to “no,” then the publish date is used and submissions are gathered into groups by the day they were submitted.
The rating algorithm uses a slightly modified version of Reddit’s “hot” calculation, explained in-depth here:
The number of upvotes a submission has is combined with the number of comments it has received to determine a “score.” This score is then combined with the publish date to determine its ranking. Older posts experience time decay of their rating, making it so that older posts with a high score will still fall off the front page.
A new rating is calculated when an upvote or downvote happens, when a comment is submitted, and hourly via wp-cron. The update is done in stages, calculating older submissions every other hour. This should not affect the load time of your site.
Note: if you are running a site that has 100’s of thousands of submissions and you’re seeing slow rating updates, please contact us for assistance.