How to Optimize your Popularity Contest Values!

By Luqmaan

If you are a WordPress user you’ll probably be knowing about Alex King’s neat plugin ‘Popularity Contest’ which lets you identify your most popular blog posts based on scores given for each post which are given taking views, comments and trackbacks into consideration. The plugin does its job wonderfully because it takes all the important aspects that goes into making a post popular into consideration.

What I don’t seem to find accurate are the default values given for each of these things. By default apart from views, comments, trackbacks & pingbacks, scores are also given for ‘home’ views, ‘archive’ views, ‘category’ views and ‘feed’ views which is what I find ‘unfair’, unfair to older posts.

So my edited fairer version of the Popularity values are as follows:

Permalink views – 1
Home views – 0
Archive views – 0
Category views – 0
Feed views – 0
Comments – 2
Pingbacks – 5
Trackbacks – 8

The new values will be immediately implemented once you save the values. If you look at the values now there’s no ‘preferential treatment’ to the new posts. You could have the value in tens as in 10, 20, 50 and 80 but why waste bytes! The minute I updated these values I notices a much fairer list of most popular posts in my sidebar and the popular posts were similar to the list according to Google Analytics as well which shows the real popularity of a post as it is based on how many times it has been viewed which is what ‘popularity’ is in this contest. I also noticed some of the older posts which were clearly more popular than the ones which were on top before like ‘Opera vs Firefox’ has now made it to the top ten so I guess this combination of values is more accurate.

You can change these values by going to WP Dashboard > Settings > Popularity if you were wondering.

Have a better combination of values? Let me know below!

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About The Author

Luqmaan is a Software Developer and the main writer behind Computer Realm.

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1 Comment so far

sukosaki May 6, 2008 8:52 am

I have been looking for values like this for a while. I tried them, but have same results. I am going to look into it more though. Thanks for the tip.

sukosaki’s last blog post..ShoppingAds.com For Niche Blogs

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