RvG

  • what the hell!
  • Posts: 24

Arantor

  • As powerful as possible, as complex as necessary.
  • Posts: 14,278
When we unite against a common enemy that attacks our ethos, it nurtures group solidarity. Trolls are sensational, yes, but we keep everyone honest. | Game Memorial

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
  • Posts: 16,082
Re: Request feature: Related Topics
« Reply #2, on May 9th, 2011, 03:24 PM »
We already have a 'prev/next' topic feature that runs fine.
Related topics is something I could tackle in the future, it could be fun to develop (and try to make accurate, mind you Pete :P)
As for performance -- if it can be disabled, it's not a problem...

Arantor

  • As powerful as possible, as complex as necessary.
  • Posts: 14,278
Re: Request feature: Related Topics
« Reply #3, on May 9th, 2011, 06:24 PM »
I have yet to see anyone come up with something that performs even modestly well without it being absolutely crap; invariably it's done by finding subjects in other topics that have matching words to the current topic's subject.

With tags it might be made to be more relevant but until computers can be made to handle semantic meaning without pre-programming (and remember, even the Watson machine that could handle playing Jeopardy was pre-programmed with contextual analysis, and it was a supercomputer, rather than a small webhost), it really is going to either be crap or worse.

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
  • Posts: 16,082
Re: Request feature: Related Topics
« Reply #4, on May 9th, 2011, 06:32 PM »
Well, that's what I thought anyway: using tags... In regular forums, it's a pretty useless feature, it's more interesting in blogs, so we could simply take the tag list, and try to find posts that share at least two tags with it.