XF 2.3 Trending Content weirdness

[Mendalla]

I have just upgraded to 2.3.2 (went swimmingly, by the way). Trending Content has picked up a thread that has been inactive since May 2016. Trying to figure out what I need to tweak since it really is a thread that has come and gone and by no means is "trending". Thoughts to what to look at? There is actually another thread from the same time period that is far longer (like 4 or 5 times as many replies) and has like 4x the views and I have those two metrics rated the highest so I am not sure what is skewing it. Reaction score, maybe? Half-life is 30 days.

 

[Mendalla]

Tinkering with weightings and other settings got it down to the bottom of the list (it was actually moving up) but it is still on there.

 

[beerForo]

Setting "Views" to zero works, I had 3 threads in Trending older than 10 years old based on the really high views, but they were certainly not trending, they were from 2008, 2010, 2011, and they probably had high views from google only. Views was only at 1, but zero fixed it.

 

[Ben Grimm - Tepucom B.V.]

Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place (i.e. Appearance - Widgets - Trending content), but I don't see the ability to weight views and such.

The Order By and Duration and such are all there, but no weighting options.

What am I missing, or am I in the wrong spot?

 

[Ben Grimm - Tepucom B.V.]

Answering my own question: under Logging Options. That would have been a handy link in the widget setup page, but oh well.

 

[Kilt]

Trending Content has picked up a thread that has been inactive

I have this same issue in 2.3.4.

Setting "Views" to zero works

I don't see where to do this.

Answering my own question: under Logging Options

Sorry, but I can't find that either. Can someone point me in the right direction.

 

[Jeremy P]

It'll be the trending content weights option. It should appear if you enter "trending" at the quick-search:

 

[Kilt]

It'll be the trending content weights option. It should appear if you enter "trending" at the quick-search:

View attachment 318133

Thank you, Jeremy.

Found it, and setting View weight from 1 to 0 did get rid of the very old thread that kept hanging on. It surprises me that so many people must be viewing an old thread that no one is replying to, and that changing the View weight from 1 to 0 would have such a big effect. Makes me wonder whether there's not some sort of bug somewhere in the algorithm.

 

[Jeremy P]

It's almost certainly just bot views which are beyond the capabilities of our naive bot detection. You can disable counting guest views instead if you want.

 

[beerForo]

The super old threads that were being marked trending had like 60K views as compared to newer ones with only hundreds. You can confidently assume with high views like that, they are still getting high views as well, so that's why the days limit will not work to remove them. I recommend setting views to 0 rather than disabling guest views, as, that affects your overall view stats, not just trending.

 

[Jeremy P]

Most of the guest views have been and will be bot traffic anyway, so I wouldn’t personally imbue them with much significance for either trending results or overall stats.

Member views likely have much better SNR and correlate more strongly with real human engagement.

If you want more accurate overall stats I’d just use a dedicated analytics platform.

 

[beerForo]

That's a good point as well. It's a bit of an artificial number. However it may carry perceived value which is why I will leave it intact.