How Article Popularity is Calculated
Ever wonder how some articles tend to be listed as more popular than others on your Docs site? This article covers everything you've wondered about popularity rankings, and how those are determined.
In this article
How is Popularity Calculated?
Article popularity is calculated based on article views. When someone views a published article on your public Docs site, the popularity of that article will increase. If you're interested in the technical stuff, a view only counts once per session (which is 6 hours), per person. For example, if somebody viewed an article twice in the same six-hour session, then only their first view is counted.
No, Really. How is it Calculated?
Popularity is calculated based on views relative to the other articles in a Collection. We then scale the rating from 0 to 5 using this formula: Popularity = (views / mostViewsInCollection) * 5.0
As mentioned above, the popularity is based on view counts. In the formula, mostViewInCollection is simply the number of views on the most popular article in the Collection. If you have an article with 100 views, making it the most popular, it would have a popularity rating of 5.0. If you had an article with 80 views, it would have a rating of 4.0. An article with 60 views would have a 3.0 and so on.
Those ratings are then applied to the popularity meter you see on the administration side of Docs.
Sorting by Popularity
When you click into a Collection on your public Docs site, we'll show you a list of your most popular articles by default. Clicking on a Category will also show respective articles sorted by popularity. End-users can sort the articles appearing under a Category alphabetically, if desired.
Common questions
Can I manually modify which articles are more popular than others?
There are no manual popularity controls - it's all based on view counts.
How do you determine sessions in the browser?
Our server sets a cookie with a specific expiration date. After the six hour session, if the same end-user revisits an article, the popularity will increase as expected.