Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
Answer scoring and ordering
Overview
On Codidact, answers to questions are sorted by their scores, so that you'll see the best-received answers first. Each answer has a score based on a ratio of upvotes to total votes, weighted to favor posts with fewer downvotes. For example, a post with seven upvotes will be shown higher than a post with nine upvotes and two downvotes. This method gives a slight boost to contributions that are consistently viewed positively over more controversial answers that gather both upvotes and downvotes.
Calculations Used
The actual score of a particular post is calculated as
This uses a modified form of a Wilson Score, assuming a binomial distribution. By default the weighting constant z is two, but each community can change this to another value as they see fit. Several charts and graphs showing the default weighting distribution are shown below.
Diagram showing the distribution in scores where upvotes less downvotes = 3 for different values of z
This table shows the scores for each combination of upvotes and downvotes where z = 2.
