We have a Best Nodes and a Worst Nodes, but there's another interesting category ... "Most Active Nodes." Controversial nodes might not make it into either of those categories, yet still receive an evenly balanced but large number of votes. I suppose you'd have to sift through the DB to find out whether there are enough nodes in this category to warrant the addition.

Philosophy can be made out of anything -- or less

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RE: How about
by footpad (Abbot) on Oct 18, 2000 at 20:08 UTC
    As a novice in this community, I would personally find this very instructive.
[reply]
      Another statistic of interest is the total rep for a thread. An active thread with lots of interesting responses can be of interest/teach us even if none of the individual nodes was a top scorer.

      Together we are more then our parts...

      I was originally thinking total rep / # of posts, but then I thought that an active thread (with more posts) is not inherently "less interesting" then one with only a few, good posts. Individual taste, I guess, and the ability to filter noise for signal.

      =Blue
      ...you might be eaten by a grue...

[reply]
        What if...

        You could abstain from voting on a message to learn its reputation? This would be different than not voting. It would cost a vote and prevent you from voting on the message in the future.

        Thus, it might be possible for newer members to learn which messages are interesting to the other members without down-voting or artifically inflating a node's reputation?

        -- footpad
        ...But only if your batteries run out...

        Update: *chagrin* I should have used Super Search, not Search, before posting...Well, at least I know it wasn't a completely bad idea. :-}

[reply]
        *Total* rep might not be desirable. A thread with 50 nested replies each with 1 or 2 rep could rack up 75 in total rep and have little useful content. I wonder if there's a useful metric we could apply here..? Average? Max? Some formula that comes up with a totally different "score" for ranking threads?
[reply]

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