The like button - what it does and does not do

[whole diary]

[SandTEngineer]

Very strange.  Looks OK on my SAMSUNG Tablet.

[grahame]

OK ... I have been playing.   Smaller font size, slightly reduced box.  But always a messy compromise here with the variety of browsers and the limited number (and time) I have to try.   Also been playing with the number of rows to show.

The idea of the section is to highlight transport activity, rather than our activity here, so any likes in "News and Assisitance" don't appear in these headlines, though they do appear in the "recent likes" link at the page top - which I will be moving onto the "most recent liked" topics as a link once the current format issues are compromised as appropriate.  Likes on "Frequent Poster" and other such board threads are also not going to appear at the top of every page; it's a standard banner for whether people are logged on or not, and irrespective of member groups.

[SandTEngineer]

As I said earlier, don't spend too much time on this.  More important things in life to do 

[JayMac]

Text gone big again. Takes up half my mobile screen.

[grahame]

Question asked ... "what do those number on the 'Most Recent Likes' mean"

It's a scoreboard system designed to make Eurovision scoring look fair and simple    ... Most recent 60 likes are extracted from database.  Most recent of all scores 56 points, second most recent 53, third 50, and so on - a 6% decay on each like.  By the time you've gone back 20 likes, you're adding just 17 to the score, and you're adding just 5 by the time you've gone back 40 likes.  The algorithm is coded at http://www.wellho.net/resources/ex.php?item=h308/liked.php .

Currently I see:

Most liked recent subjects
[158] More dangerous overcrowding to the Westcountry
[97] Purton Museum: New exhibition explores history of village rail...
[80] GWR^▸ (Great Western Railway) mobile tickets
[72] 24 hour trains
[56] GWR Website problems
[46] Some say Somerset is behind the times...

there are 5 recent(ish) likes on a post in "More dangerous overcrowding to the Westcountry", four quite recent likes on Purton museum, a couple also on GWR mobile tickets, and so on.

I have tuned the algorithm so that a couple of likes will quickly bring subjects to the fore, but then they will fade off quite quickly; the idea is to be something that people can see what's trending rather than giving any sort of longer term view.

The "recent likes" button at the top of the page brings in a lot more subjects - the algorithm is the same, but the factors and number of likes analysed differ to give a more general trend and less volatile report.  Top of each page for headlines, if you click on the full report you get a much longer story from where you can go through each of the posts selected in a separate frame.  I may rename this button to clarify the difference ...

[Phantom]

Text gone big again. Takes up half my mobile screen.

When I was typing a reply on another thread, the text went over the top of the reply button so was unable to "hit reply"
Had to delete some of what was written so the screen scrolled up again