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The hot questions algorithm was changed recently. I like the effects, since I see lots of new interesting stuff every day rather than waiting 6-8 weeks varying amounts of time for the list to update.

However, the new algorithm also has the interesting side effect of recursing the same question:

"Did you like this question? You might also be interested in reading it from this link over here!

Of course, this is a world-shattering workflow-breaking unicorn-hating waffle-despising ERROR tremendously minor matter. But, if the SE devs have opportunity during their amazingly large amounts of free time, it might be nice to add a check for the current page before populating the hot questions list.

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    Well it is still a hot question even if you're on the question
    – Richard Tingle
    Feb 6, 2014 at 15:25
  • @AlienArrays: I'm trying to follow that and failing. (No coffee today.) Are you quite sure you didn't mean "duplication"?
    – Jonathan Garber
    Feb 6, 2014 at 15:31
  • @AlienArrays I suppose you could say that you can follow a link to the question again and again. But really by that definition the main page recurses too. To be truly recersive I would expect it to autoload the page over and over by redirecting to itself
    – Richard Tingle
    Feb 6, 2014 at 15:34
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    Not a new behavior and not a bug. When visiting hot qustion from the list, it will still appear in the list.
    – Shadow Wizard Love Zelda
    Feb 6, 2014 at 15:45
  • I noticed that even reloading the page will give different list of hot questions
    – BЈовић
    Feb 6, 2014 at 15:52
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    @BЈовић That is correct - see What changed in the Hot Questions sidebar algorithm?
    – user213963
    Feb 6, 2014 at 15:54

2 Answers 2

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This is not a bug. This is . A question should still show up as hot if you're on that page. It would be too much effort for too little reward to fix this. Plus, you're not a mindless webcrawler (hopefully) that just follows all the links on the pages. Even if you were a webcrawler, you'd probably avoid links going to your current location.

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  • Any webcrawler that blindly went to all links on a page would get trapped by any question as well because the title links back to itself (which is useful when on a URL to an answer/comment)
    – Richard Tingle
    Feb 6, 2014 at 23:11
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I agree with Jonathan. The Hot Network Questions sidebar never provides a full snapshot of the questions that are currently on the list, but only a subset. As such, the absence of any given question from the sidebar does not imply that the question is no longer "hot".

Behaviour like this adds no value and it simply looks buggy:

The only way to claim "this is not a bug" with a straight face is to seriously believe that the desired behaviour was a buggy-looking webpage.

Beyond that, scrblnrd3's "too much effort" argument is ridiculous. If this takes more than one line of code to fix, I'll eat my hat.

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