Just have to get this off my chest, How Should Boards Be Ranked?

[bret]

Originally posted by Jim
So, I guess here is an idea. Why not ignore threads that are started just to inflate the numbers? It seems it would be easy to do...you have all the numbers. If you see a board jump much more than usual, take a look and see why.

that is what i was getting at when i said use the mean reply count and remove outliers, if a board gets an unusal amount of replies to a thread, the forumla would ignore that thread. it helps to keep the data focused, sort of how the judging in an olypmic event works, the highest and lowest ratings are thrown away. but in this case, any extremely high or low thread when be thrown out of the dataset, not just the absolute highs and lows.