Week is not a useful default for the /users page

Question

First off I don't think having "this week", "this month" or "this year" is a good idea; while it's computationally cheaper than the equivalent "last 7 days", "last 30 days", "last 365 days" it becomes kind of useless every Sunday (1st of month (like, uh, today), 1st of year).

This really becomes evident when you see a user's top tags and realize they all come from the same recent question. (Paul Nathan's top tags, e.g., are careers, feature-request and status-planned; hmm, why is that familiar...)

That "problem" (I don't think it's a feature anyway) is also caused because IMHO week reputation and weekly top tags really are kind of meh; it's just not enough data to be representative. The user page would go from "always the same faces" to something quite more transient (and random); I'm not sure I like that.

The situation is even worse on new, low activity Stack Exchanges. Let's look at Bycicles:

Yup! I just signed up. Our favourite unicorn shepherd also gets some first page action with his 1 rep change (or rather, -1 rep change).

Association bonus and downvotes counting in the leagues have been fixed in the meantime, as Jeff points out.

Here's what that users page looks like with two months of data.

So yes, I'd rather see a last rolling quarter window for something both more dynamic than what we had, more stable than what we're having and more interesting overall.

Answer 1

I was also totally jarred when we discussed this feature. Intuitively I thought week = 7 days rolling ... makes sense. Always populated.

I have, however, come around to this design, because of:

1. Parity with SE leagues - all the SE leagues work this way, it would be odd to have leagues on our sites work differently.

2. Technically building a 7 day rolling rep count is much harder than fixed time frames.

3. The leagues feel a lot more like a game when they have a start date set in stone. Everybody starts on equal footing and then as time progresses it stabilizes. You start the game on Sunday, finish it on Sunday and then repeat. Everyone feels like they have a chance. Not happy with the game this week, you can try playing again next week.

4. Rolling leagues can be confusing for end-users, you feel like you made progress today, yet you made less progress than you did 7 days ago, so you drop in ranking.

---

That said, we still have bugs, we need to exclude the 100 rep association bonus under all conditions.

I am not convinced I would like to exclude any users from the default tab in /users as people use that page to find users.

---

Addendum

There is a new network wide setting (Stack Overflow is excluded) that requires an interval has 6 days of data prior to being picked, SO se sites should always default to a sane tab.

Answer 2

I must emphatically agree with this complaint. Even with the migration bonus "bug" fixed (originally we were seeing users with no posts who just registered), there's just way too much noise in the "week" display for it to make any sense as the default view.

I understand the rationale for this feature. I realize that there was a widespread sense of "what have you done for me lately?" when people looked at the old users page, and a sense of discouragement among newer members upon realizing that they would probably never make it to the front page. But a 1-week view, even if it actually worked correctly and displayed 1 full week as opposed to "this calendar week", is simply too short a time frame.

People upvote weird stuff sometimes on Stack Exchanges. We all know that there's an element of timing and flat-out randomness in voting. This isn't generally seen as a problem because it tends to sort itself out pretty well over the long term. Random swarms of upvotes are quickly lost in the ether over a period of weeks or months if you don't keep up your activity, but on every site other than Stack Overflow, reputation tends to arrive in sporadic bursts, and even the Mortarboard badge is rare.

When your "top" users have a score of 22 (some with overall scores of less than 100), something's way wrong. That's one half-decent question or answer and an accept vote (given, not received).

At least set some reasonable thresholds here, and don't show users who've had fewer than 10 upvotes or so. Or, as badp says, just use a rolling month or quarter as the default view, which will have less randomness and noise on a lower-activity SE (i.e. all of them).

Otherwise the user page is basically kindergarten for adults. Everyone's a winner! Again!

Answer 3

The two obvious options that come to mind

1. Treat week as a moving window of today + last 6 days (UTC)
   
   
   • This is computationally expensive, and would probably be best updated daily or at most hourly.
   • If you need to see your position change after every single vote, you are in trouble.
     
     
2. Treat week as last week
   
   
   • This would apply equally to month/quarter
   • An option would be to rachet over to current [period] once we are more than 50% into the period, or only after a certain threshold of time has passed within the current [period]
   • Using the option of racheting over, even if it is at least 2 days into the week, would allow for the early non-sensical volatility to play no role in the /users page, giving it some modicum of stability while still allowing renewed (clean-slate) efforts every week/m/q