Please add a new sort order option for the Users page: rolling reputation window

Question

The default view for the Users page is by all-time reputation. Now I don't have a problem with that but every now and again (moreso on UV) you got topics that seem to be premised on it essentially not being fair that high rep users... had high rep.

There was also the occasional hand-wringing incident about what would happen if Jon Skeet suddenly stopped contributing. He'd still have all this rep, etc.

Now I largely dismiss those concerns but just today I was thinking: since the barrier to entry at the high end is now so high and even though reputation is certainly no measure of expertise, standing or quality it is a useful tool for recognizing contribution.

Maybe we should have another view of reputation on the Users page which is a rolling window. For example: reputation gained in the last 6 months. Pick whichever window you think would work best (suggestions welcome). It will let users see highly active users if they so wish.

We already have a variant of this on the tag info pages where you can see who has been the most active over the last month.

Answer 1

This relates to an idea from a long time ago about a "per month" reputation league table. The "per tag per month" stats make that slightly less "new" than it would be otherwise, but I suspect that it would be used a lot more than the per tag version, partly as it would be somewhat more discoverable (how often do people really look at a single tag?).

Another idea might be a "reputation today" page. This would serve two purposes:

• Provide another way of seeing where you are in respect to the reputation cap (without going to the envelope and then explicitly clicking today to get round the time oddity). For this reason, I'd suggest that just like the tag stat pages, your own number should always be shown.

• Give more visibility of the competition for accepted answers beyond the rep cap.

Downsides:

• Still aimed at mostly "high end" users, even if they don't currently have high rep; I've said before that improvements which impact the casual user (you know, ~90% of the traffic) deserve more time.

• Do we really need even more focus on rep? ;)

Answer 2

I've always been a proponent of different sortings and rankings on the users page, so this seems to fit in nicely with other ones that I have proposed in the past (such as ratios on answers to questions, etc.)

Now if only we could get it.

Answer 3

I like this a lot. It could help give newer users exposure, which is increasingly helpful as the site ages. As time goes on it becomes almost impossible to reach the first few pages simply because the users before you had such a large head start.

Personally, I like Jon Skeet's idea of reputation as a function of rep per day (was brought up regarding something completely unrelated). Now it could use a bit of work with regards to adding a minimum age restriction, but that's easy to fix.

select id, reputation, 
   (LastAccessDate - creationdate) / (24 * 60*60) as days_on_site,
   reputation / ((LastAccessDate - creationdate) / (24 * 60*60)) as rep_per_day
from users
where (LastAccessDate - creationdate) / (24 * 60*60) > 2
order by reputation / ((LastAccessDate - creationdate) / (24 * 60*60)) desc

Sadly, I can almost guarentee this feature request won't be considered simply because there are several basic errors in the user list that are status bydesign, for whatever reason.

Answer 4

Reputation leagues are now rolled out:
https://stackexchange.com/leagues

Blog entry:
https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/08/network-central-stackexchange-com/