Of the two suggestions, replacing hours with artificial ticks adds very little complexity: it's the same formula, with one value replaced, and the accompanying factor adjusted. (The ticks might be submission-count, upvote-count, visit-count, or anything else trivially tallied -- it may not make much difference, except that over time greater activity could require adjusting the tick-deflator-factor.)
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I'd agree simple is better.
Of the two suggestions, replacing hours with artificial ticks adds very little complexity: it's the same formula, with one value replaced, and the accompanying factor adjusted. (The ticks might be submission-count, upvote-count, visit-count, or anything else trivially tallied -- it may not make much difference, except that over time greater activity could require adjusting the tick-deflator-factor.)
visit count is not trivial. A db write for every page view is heavy.
Persist it in memory, you only need periodical writes for something like that. We're not running on a $5 powweb account here.
Right, but then it's not trivial which was my point. It can. Be trivial and not scale, or scale and not be trivial.
I'm not sure why I get down voted for this.