282696 - "most popular" should sort by <downloads this week> not <total downloads>

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Public Pages, defect)

Description

[Anton P.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Webunicorn/1.0 (Firefox/1.0 polymorph)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Webunicorn/1.0 (Firefox/1.0 polymorph)

The title says it all, really. It appears that sorting Firefox extensions by
popularity yields results based on downloads per week. I can see no good reason
for this. The listings would be far more stable if total downloads were used as
the metric. (I would imagine that for most extensions, download numbers do not
increase linearly with time, and so we have extensions significantly jumping
about from day to day.)

On a related note, the use of the word "popular" is slightly ambiguous, because
it is not explitly clear what it refers to on u.m.o. It should be clarified that
it refers to download numbers.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[alanjstr]

If we sorted by Total Downloads, then something that has been around for 6
months and has 10 versions would be considered more popular than something that
has been around for 1 month and has 1 version.

The page title is ambiguous and should have a description.

Comment 2

[dolphinling]

I see alanjstr's point, but I also don't think that simply the past week is good
as it favors new/newly updated extensions over old but popular ones. Perhaps
until someone comes up a with a good algorithm for it, they could be listed by
taking whatever version of the extension has the most downloads, and using that
to calculate popularity? This has problems of its own, but fewer, it seems.

Comment 3

[Cameron]

Or we could just provide both (Example of use can be seen at http://download.com)

Comment 4

[Cameron]

https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?app=firefox&sort=downloads is the link from the frontpage now :)

Comment 5

[James Ross]

Oh dear me. You actually did this?

This is ridiculous.

Sorting by total downloads is completely meaningless! I don't care much about the front-page/RSS list, but there is no point sorting search results by total downloads. At the absolute minimum, add an extra option to use the weekly count.

I should point out to dolphinling that upgrades via Firefox do NOT count at all (unless something drastic has changed) and an extension only stays on the recently updated list for a few hours.

Comment 6

[Mike Shaver (:shaver emeritus)]

We should undo this (possibly inadvertent) change, indeed.  Downloads-per-week is a bad enough metric, but downloads-since-the-dawn-of-time is worse still.

Comment 7

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Ok, so here are the sorts I can see us having:
* Newest, sorted by creation date
* Updated, sorted by updated date
* Rating, sorted by rating
* Popular, sorted by weekly download, then rating ???

We could just drop Popular, if that is what people want.  The fix itself is pretty simple.

What do you guys want to see?

Comment 8

[James Ross]

The popularity (as measured by weekly downloads) is good enough for the front page, it should be good enough for search. I don't see any need to drop it.

Comment 9

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Attachment: Fix for SQL in popular sort.

Fair enough -- this fix will get pushed with the next batch.

Comment 10

[Michael Morgan [:morgamic]]

Was pushed a while back -- resolving.