The humankind forums have a substantial number of threads with few votes and few replies which have sunk some of the interesting discussions to the third page or beyond. Initially I thought to propose limiting the number of threads that a single user can make based on a combination of upvotes received and posts made. However I think that restricting a person's ability to speak is not a very ethical solution, and furthermore interesting threads inevitably get buried by new threads regardless of how many (or few) authors are making them. Ideally people would browse the entire forum to find threads they wish to comment on, but in practice usually only the first page or two is browsed. I think it would be helpful if threads instead of being sorted by date of most recent response, were sorted by a "hot" factor, which would be a moving average of date of recent responses and upvotes. By moving average what I mean is that when a thread is first created it gains, say, 500 points. Then every time a thread is responded to or upvoted it gains, say, 100 points, then each day that goes by you remove, say, a fifth plus 10 of the points. Once threads run out of points then they are sorted by date. This would result in more active threads staying on the first page longer and threads with few responses sinking faster, but old threads revert to chronological order.

Eulogos wrote:
I think it would be helpful if threads instead of being sorted by date of most recent response, were sorted by a "hot" factor,

I've been kind of struggling myself as well to find the threads I'm interested in or want to reply to, and the "best way" I've found so far is by sorting by "Most seen".

If I may, I'd like to take the opportunity of your thread to go a little bit further, regarding the organisation or management of the forum :

- One thing struck me the first time I came here, which is the lack of a "search" functionnality. It could be very helpfull in order to check if a thread of the topic you want to discuss has already been created. Currently, as you said, we have to go through all the pages of the forum (Humankind forum in my case), read the titles of the threads, and based on the title, check all the threads that we think are discussing a particular topic. But as more and more people are joining the forum and posting, the threads list grows, which is making this way of searching quite difficult and a bit annoying :) My bad, I tried the "search" functionnality at the top of the page, which let us filter/sort by game as well, so my point is solved :)

- Following that idea, one solution could be to have sub-forums, which would categorize the topics, so that people would know where to look and eventually where to post. For instance, in the Game Design general thread, sub-forums such as "Units", "User Interface", "Cultures/Civilizations", "Civics" (and so on) could be a good start to organise all the threads. A vote could be proposed to all the members of the forum, in order to create those sub-forums, that could be a good way to involve everyone in the design of those categories.

- Lastly, that would be cool if we could sort threads by "followed". I thought that this functionnality would put the threads I'm following at the top of the first page of threads, above the most recent thread or answer to a thread, but it's not the case. Doing this would help having a better visibility on the threads I'm following.

Cheers !

Thanks @CaptainCobbs ! I didn't even noticed your reply until tonight, while checking this related thread. Hehehe !