The popularity filters

Ideas to improve Criticker and new feature requests, as well as announcements about new enhancements.
Ramy
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The popularity filters

Post by Ramy »

I think they were made when there weren't that many users. They look like this at the moment:

Very Popular : 1000 and over
Popular : 250-999
Well-Known : 50-249
Known : 13-49
Obscure : 5-12
Very Obscure : 4 and under

Shouldn't they be at least doubled?

Very Popular : 2000+
Popular : 500-1999
Well-Known : 100-499
Known : 25-99
Obscure : 10-24
Very Obscure : 9-

CosmicMonkey
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Re: The popularity filters

Post by CosmicMonkey »

I agree that the current cut-offs for categories are all too low. But I propose instead having dynamic, changing limits
that adjust automatically as the site grows. The Limit for Very Popular should be tied to 10% of whatever the most popular film on criticker is, and then keep dividing by 5 to reach each limit below that.

Right now, the film with the most rankings is currently The Matrix with 26567.

So under this proposal, maybe the limits should be something like this:

Very Popular: 2657+
Popular: 531-2656
Well-Known: 106-530
Known: 21-105
Obscure: 5-20
Very Obscure: 0-4
Last edited by CosmicMonkey on Fri May 26, 2017 2:24 am, edited 1 time in total.

djross
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Re: The popularity filters

Post by djross »

The dynamic thresholds make sense.

For reference, a cutoff set at "10% of the number of rankings for the film with maximum rankings" will leave you with a top category containing (currently) a little under 1400 movies. That's probably fairly reasonable, though it does tend to leave out some very popular movies (e.g, it would currently exclude films like An American Werewolf in London, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Dredd, though they may well all overtake the cutoff soon).

What I tend to disagree with more is at the bottom end of the scale: to me, it is clear that films with only 20 rankings should still be classed as Very Obscure, not just Obscure. And calling 21 rankings "Known" is really stretching things.

So, keeping your 10% suggestion, I would propose locating the thresholds by dividing by 3 instead of by 5, which would currently lead to the following levels:

    Very Popular: 2657+
    Popular: 885–2656
    Well-Known: 295–884
    Known: 98–294
    Obscure: 32–97
    Very Obscure: 0–31

In my view, this is a more reasonable and usable distribution of these levels.

mpowell
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Re: The popularity filters

Post by mpowell »

Thanks for these suggestions. We do have an item to look into (and update) the popularity filters, and I've added these notes to that report.

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