I noticed this new addition. It is now stated in the revision history if a question has made it to the Hot Network Questions, example:
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Oh, hey, someone noticed!
Indeed, you're correct. We've added a history event to both the edit history and the timeline to indicate when a question first appears on the Hot Network Questions list.
This was made possible by the work Adam did recently to move where we house the HNQ list in our code. This will only indicate when a question appears - there's not a similar event when the question drops off the list, so don't use it to judge whether something is currently on the list, you'll need to visit the actual list for that.
This is brand new data that we're capturing, so we won't be able to go back in time and indicate this on posts throughout history, sorry.
There are a few other updates coming soon and we'll make an actual announcement when that happens to keep you all in the loop along with handing out a few status-completed tags.
Let me know if you have any questions about this post history indicator and I'll see what I can do to get an answer for you.
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1If a post drops off for a few minutes, and then gets upvoted and put back on the list, will another event be added? Or can this event only happen once per question? – Nathaniel Feb 28 at 20:28
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@Nathaniel I don't think so. I think it's one event ever. I'll double check, though and if anyone sees multiple events feel free to let me know! – Catija♦ Feb 28 at 20:30
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2Will this be available in SEDE as history type 52 once it gets updated, per Glorfindel's answer? – Sonic the Inclusive Hedgehog Feb 28 at 20:38
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16Yes! Thank you thank you thank you Adam (and whoever else worked on this)! It'd be great if we can get the removed-from-HNQ event too and SEDE exposure, but even knowing that a question was ever hot is helpful. – Monica Cellio♦ Feb 28 at 20:39
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I agree with Monica that this is great. I'm not sure that the removed-from HNQ event is a small loss, though. I hope that the technical roadblocks that prevent it from being captured are both temporary and will be explained in significant depth in the upcoming announcement - if not then I'll ask a more detailed question after it. – E.P. Feb 28 at 22:32
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2Are there plans to indicate what is/was hot? Say on the questions list or on the question itself, like an icon 🔥? – ymb1 Mar 1 at 1:08
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@ymb1 The SOextras userscript lets you get a flame icon. – user392547 Mar 1 at 6:41
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1How will this show on a post that has no history when it becomes a Hot Question? – Wrigglenite Mar 1 at 10:13
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1@Wrigglenite You can still get to those links if you know how to access them manually, they're just not shown by default on all posts. I think there's even userscripts that make them visible by default. Whether the history link should be visible at all times is a question I've seen around for a while but it's a separate issue. :) – Catija♦ Mar 1 at 15:27
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@ymb1 At this point we have no plans for this. I'm not sure it's possible (easily) to have an indicator for something currently being hot be accurate. It's also pretty outside our standards. We don't use icons or emoji for that sort of thing, in general. It'd be a pretty big departure. The closest analogue we have is the [protected] or [closed] indicators. – Catija♦ Mar 1 at 15:34
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@Catija well, the title color can be changed according to hotness level, same way the views count is different based on amount of views. No noise, no clutter. – Shadow Wizard Mar 3 at 12:13
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Yes, and it's available via the API, too, as a revision of type 52. It'll probably end up in SEDE as well (we should know for sure by Sunday morning); this will allow for some interesting data analysis too. (Too bad I have a holiday planned for next week ...)
A GET request to https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/posts/60613/revisions?site=aviation gives
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3Time to write a bot that reports all questions that hit HNQ for extra-scrutinious editing – Magisch Mar 1 at 8:21
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@Catija looks like it ain't working yet: data.stackexchange.com/worldbuilding/query/995990 vs. worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/posts/140413/revisions – Glorfindel Mar 3 at 18:45
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Yeah, I checked... The info I got before was generally correct - it will be in SEDE eventually, it's just that we're waiting to turn it on until we check in something else. – Catija♦ Mar 7 at 7:19
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Currently for the hot questions, there is an entry added in the timeline. But due to the lengthy text the UI is looking inconsistency with the other row entries as below:
Moving the "this question was selected for the hot network questions list." text under the comment section will be preferable UI. Could be the UI update as shown below:
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