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Looking at the "top questions", I notice mine just hit 1000 views, and there is another with 11000 views, but the other "top" questions have view counts like 14, 32, 60, and rarely something over a hundred. Worldbuilding is still not a very large site.

Why would some have orders of magnitude difference? And why would a fresh post with no views still be "top"? That is, what does "top" mean? I always figured it was most recently asked/edited/answered, but I see the label is actually "top questions", not "fresh/updated threads".

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  • $\begingroup$ Questions that get on the Hot Network Question list end up getting 10-100 times as many views as those that don't (and therefore proportionally more answers/votes as well). $\endgroup$
    – Dan Smolinske
    Dec 8, 2015 at 4:13
  • $\begingroup$ But it takes more than 14 views to become "Hot" in the first place, right? I thought about that but did not ever see it on the Hot Network Question list myself. $\endgroup$
    – JDługosz
    Dec 8, 2015 at 10:48
  • $\begingroup$ I takes more than that, unless probably you get 14 views, 12 votes and 10 answers in 30 minutes. What Dan was mentionning, is that it's typical to see questions with either a few tens to hundreds views or questions with several thousands. The first ones did not (yet?) make it to the HNQ, while the others did. $\endgroup$
    – clem steredenn
    Dec 8, 2015 at 11:04

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I am not sure what you are referring to. But if you mean the fontpage of Worldbuilding, which indicates "Top questions", you'll notice, on the right of the said "Top questions" indication that you can sort by "active", "featured", "hot", "week" and "month". By default, "active" is selected. Meaning, that the highest question is the one that was most recently active. Active includes:

  • asking a question
  • answering a question
  • editing a post

and possibly some comments as well. So in that view, you have fresh questions as well as older questions which had a new answer (or were edited).

As far as I can tell, the other sorting criteria use the Hot Number calculation. And the featured are the ones where a bounty is placed upon. But there are none as of writing.

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  • $\begingroup$ OK, so "Top" here actually means "Results in descending order" based on the sort mode chosen. I also notice there are handy tooltips explaining the sorts, browsing on a desktop PC. That's lost on a tablet browser (my normal use of Worldbuilding.SE) since there is no 'hover'. $\endgroup$
    – JDługosz
    Dec 8, 2015 at 10:54

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