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As promised, a new formula is now being used to determine the order that scripts appear in a category. Below is how it is determined:


First, all sponsored listings in the category appear at the top. If there are multiple sponsored listings in a category, they will be rotated daily to ensure equal opportunity in the #1 position.

Here is the forumla for all other listings:

1) Each day, scripts are assigned 0 points.

POINTS = 0

2) If the Script is less than 15 days old, it receives bonus points to give it exposure. We take 2000 divided by the number of days old the script is and add that to the total points

POINTS = POINTS + (2000/DaysOld)

3) Next, we add points for the average number of hits a link receives per day.

POINTS = POINTS + (Hits / DaysOld)

4) Next, we add points for the average number of download hits a link receives per day.

POINTS = POINTS + (DloadHits / DaysOld)

5) Next, we add points for rankings, averaged over the number of days a script has been listed.

POINTS = POINTS + ((Ranking * Votes) / DaysOld)

6) Next, we add or subtract points based on member reviews. The way this works is all reviews with a 5 receive 9 points, a 4 receives 6 points, a 3 receives 3 points, a 2 receives -5 points, and a 1 receives -10 points. All of these points are summed and divided by the number of days old the listing is.

POINTS = POINTS + ((ReviewPoints * # of Reviews) / DaysOld)

7) Last, we take the number of times the link has been recommended to someone, multiply that by 100 and divide by the number of days old the listing is. Yes, we do multiply it by 100 as this is an important stat as it helps draw people to HotScripts.com! But, don't be foolish and recommend the script yourself to a bunch of people in order to attempt to boost your ranking as we log details about the recommendation and there is a "spam" detector built in which will actually turn the recommend points into a NEGATIVE NUMBER if it detects this!

POINTS = POINTS + ((Recommendations * 100) / DaysOld)


All scripts then have a ranking with 12 decimal places (xxx.xxxxxxxxxxxx) and are then sorted within their category according from highest points to lowest.


We will also be incorporating other factors into the ranking formula as we introduce some new features, such as tracking links from your own website to HotScripts.com and other new enhancements, coming soon.


For your information, we generally rebuild all of the pages of the site between 4:00 am and 5:00 am Eastern daily.


Well, now you know how the sort order works! Thanks to all who have provided advice in this matter. As you can see, we incorporated many of your ideas.


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