Posted 6/19/2023 12:40 PM (GMT 0)
Of course threads get posted here on the forum all the time, every day, and that's good. It means the forum is staying active, ideas are being exchanged, knowledge is being shared.
Usually, and appropriately, that knowledge involves some aspect of PCa, although a topic involving a related medical issue or subject is probably okay to bring up and discuss.
Even an off-topic item is okay to bring up and talk about now and then.
And let's don't forget the Friday Humor and/or Fun threads.
So whatever it is, a thread gets posted, gets started, people start clicking on it and reading it, hopefully, and maybe they even reply to it.
Business as usual on the forum.
But then I started to wonder, just what is it that makes for a successful thread here? One that has resulted in a useful transfer of knowledge, or has made people think, or inspired them, or answered a question that they may have had?
Well, one answer to that question that I have always felt was valid was if just one person has been helped by reading that thread, then the thread has been successful.
But be that as it may, still, how do we, how would we, measure something like thread success?
How could we go about measuring a thread's success here on the forum?
So, what I would like to do now, just for fun, is offer a suggestion that might apply in judging a thread's success, and at the same time invite all of you to offer what you think might serve as measure(s) of success.
Okay, for starters, I would point out that there already exist a couple of possible numerical measures for thread success, and they are always present on the index screen.
To the right of each thread title on the index screen, there are numbers given for "replies" and "views." The terms are self-explanatory, and with each followed by a number, perhaps they are useful as measures of the thread's "success."
I suppose the simplest way to use those numbers to measure thread success would simply be to add them together, so that success is easily determined as being simply the sum of the number of replies and views it has achieved:
S = R + V
So that, the higher the value of S, the more successful the thread is.
But someone might say, "a thread is more successful if a number of people have taken the time and trouble to post a reply to it, rather than just clicking on it to view it."
Okay, so let's weight the R over the V a little bit, making it, say, twice as important:
S = R + (1/2)V
Is that better?
Then, to arrive at a "base" value for average thread success, I used the second formula above to calculate S values for all of the threads listed on the first page of the forum index screen for yesterday (June 18). (I had to use something as the basis for generating data!)
That produced an average S value for the threads on that first page of
S = 282
Which means that, on average, a thread with an S score of 282 is an "average" success, while one with a higher S score is more successful, and one with a lower S score is less successful.
(I know, I know, this is all getting way too pedantic, and maybe even silly, but what the heck, maybe it's making for a fun thread!)
And it's at least an attempt to come up with, again, maybe some kind of way to gauge just how successful a forum thread is.
However important that may be. Or not.
Or, maybe it's better just to use some general, more common-sensical measures, without trying to get too fancy about it. Such as: a thread that gets only a few views and no replies is not a success, while one that gets a bunch of both is a success, and leave it at that.
Or, do any of you have any thoughts you would care to offer on what makes for a successful thread here on the forum? (And which may or may not involve equations??!!)
Again, not the most important discussion we might be having about our threads, but maybe one that's good for a little fun!