Content Ordering

The submission content on the site can be ordered one of two ways:

1. By a calculated rating that depends on upvotes, date, and comments
2. By publish date

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.