949623 - Change "Featured" sidebar events to be based on view hits

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webtools Graveyard :: Air Mozilla, defect, P2)

Description

[Peter Bengtsson [:peterbe]]

At the moment the sidebar contains events that have the "Featured" flag on them. Instead we should use a scoring ranking similar to Reddit, Hacker News, etc. where "hot" events appear in that list.

We should use a scoring algorithm that favors freshness first and view hits second. The way to do that is take the `total_hits / age` and multiply with the inverse of a "gravity factor". E.g. `total_hits / age^1.8`. What that does is that it means that freshness favors more than total_hits. Thus, even the ones with lots and lots of hits slowly drop off. 

Here's an example of calculating a score using 1.8 as a gravity factor
https://gist.github.com/peterbe/7933039

What we should do with the existing "featured" flag on events is to keep it. And what we should is basically bake that in to the scoring as a "cheat". What we could do is; if the event is marked as featured we double its hits. That would basically make it bubble up higher for a while but "die out" just like other events eventually. 

One question is remaining, shall we still headline this, in the sidebar, as "Featured Videos" or shall we install call it something like "Trending Events"?

Comment 1

[Richard A Milewski[:richard]]

I like "Trending Events"

Comment 2

[Richard A Milewski[:richard]]

...or maybe just "Trending".

Comment 3

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/airmozilla

https://github.com/mozilla/airmozilla/commit/eb52c5bed6846c5e00f22ab5b151d9d925d33468
fixes bug 949623 - featured events sorted by hits

https://github.com/mozilla/airmozilla/commit/90a544872600302c12b859f71345bd09a8f24db3
fixes bug 949623 - featured events sorted by hits

Comment 4

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/airmozilla

https://github.com/mozilla/airmozilla/commit/73ceaddd23fdc03fb085661804e3e99bcf85e06a
bug 949623 - add Trending score introspection in management