Hey meta-people. So I was wondering about this "activity" you show for each user based on the amount of posts combined with the post frequency over weeks since registration, and other details I'm possibly forgetting right now.
My issue with this metric is that it is completely irrelevant, I see users posting replies like "lol, right", "me too", "hi", "you're welcome", and so on. Which are fully useless, add nothing to the topic, yet increases the activity. I can imaginate a couple of reasons of why people do that, like being close to 10 years old, raising activity in accounts for selling them so other people can promote their services with sock puppets, or getting a higher rank. I have no hope for the first situation, this requires a nation-wide re-education which this forum cannot handle.
The other situations can be partially handled by simple rules, a more advanced system would apply some form of NLP. Would it be possible to not count towards activity replies with less than 5 words ? Maybe even reduce the activity when that occurs. People reported as trolls and such should never have their activity increased until they stop trolling. You could also take a dict and only count the words in a reply that appear in that dict, if it is below 5, then it cannot count towards activity either.
This bothers me because legitimate "hero members" and others are negatively affected by this kind of people.
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