more useful default result order: downloaded

[fnl]

Well, that ^^

I always use the most downloaded sub, as that in 99% of all cases is the file I want. I believe I am not alone with this UX. It would be nice if the site would by default sort all results by number of downloads.

Cheers,
flo

[SmallBrother]

Many people use "most downloaded" as guideline to choose. But often this is just the oldest subtitle and in that sense the newer ones will have a greater chance of being 'better' (spelling corrections, timings, etc.)

[fnl]

Well, my opinion and experience is the contrary: the less downloads, the worse the subtitle.

[oss]

SmallBorther is right, there is first versions of subtitles, which are uploaded, normally they got OCR errors and are poor. Users will download those subtitles. Then better quality subtitles come and they will never got so much downloads when sorting by downloads. It makes sense to order it by upload date. Of course the best would be order them by combining few parameters - upload date, downloads, rating of subtitles, number of votes, rank of uploader and so on.

[eduo]

SolEol at the moment does a weighted ranking based on several factors. Rating (7-8 add a point, 1-3 substract 3 points, 1,4-6 and 10 are ignored), and age (actually, I extend download number over age, which gives a fairer chance to newer subs) are two of them, as are specific flags. Most of each add points to what the final score ends up being.

So far the algorithm has worked OK. People don't usually complain, at least.

I don't auto-select subs when searching by name because the results are usually *too fuzzy* and they come from too many titles to be useable. Making the search a lot less fuzzy and supporting search by moviefilename would help a lot here.

Probably what helps the most, though, is user ratings. I keep insisting that it'd be much better to implement "+1" and "-1" ratings rather than the current "0-10" one. People know if they liked or disliked a subtitle, but nobody would agree on what a grade of "8" would mean in a subtitle rating.

In the end, though, it's trivial to order by whatever criteria you wish. Since we get download counts, what use is getting API results already ordered? I'd rather have them faster unordered.