In the Users -> Top Posters page I see a column with "Ranked Posts" next to each user.
What they are is actually self explanatory. I suppose what I am actually asking is how are posts ranked?
I hope it's not some sort of AI doing the ranking :-D
I think it simply is a list of what we usually call top posters. And hopefully I will be a lot lower on that list soon. I just was a little titillated the first few days here, testing things. And learnt things by doing so, so I started to answer newcomers' questions about how things worked when I could.
Yes, but the user ranking is based on the Ranked Posts value and not the Total Posts value.
At the time of this post I see you are ranked 2 and I am ranked 4........I'm not sure having me up so high in the rankings is a good advertisement for this forum. I think I'll have to put the brakes on my posting for a while and slowly sink to a much lower level on the list :-)
I think it's a general problem with innovative software. Because they do things in a new way they also feel the need to call familiar things something new and different. I've (tried) to use desktop software that is total confusion because of this.
Maybe "Likes" are involved in the ranking but going on the miniscule number of "likes" on my posts I think "likes" would play a very small, if any, part in the overall ranking of a post.
Maybe leftyee is right. I haven't more than glanced at that page, but there is a column called "Ranked post". What could it be if not likes? Still strange though because almost all of my post have got "ranked" and that isn't possible. So what else can it be?
Darn. I don't find anywhere we can see the number of likes we have. But I know I don't have that many. A mystery!
Look at the column where the number of posts are stated. It mainly follows the rank - but there are exceptions! We will never figure this out ourselves.
I thought I was alone in thinking that ranking high in the list of prolific posters wasn’t necessarily a good thing - in 20 years on DPR, I managed 400 posts. This forum feels like a much more friendly environment and it feels good to be in at the start and helping to shape things for the future but I’ll be watching carefully to ensure that I stay low in the rankings!
My best guess is that the ranking of users is done periodically (e.g. once a day or so) and that the "ranked posts" is simply the number of posts the user had the last time the rankings were updated. In the meantime, the "Total posts" count continues to go up if the user has been posting since the last ranking.
That said, I visited the Users page a day or more ago and was somewhat perplexed to see that my "Ranked posts" number was one higher than my "Total posts". I can't think of any good explanation for that. Maybe if I'd deleted a post (but I hadn't, and I don't know if that's even possible - it doesn't seem to be presently). So maybe that was a bug. I haven't seen that again in a more recent visit.