# Reputation's sliding window?

One may have the same weekly and monthly score. It's quite common. It's less common under such circumstances (of coinciding weekly and monthly gain) to be more advanced on the monthly list than on the weekly one.

This was just a curiosity. I like trivia. Even when they are about me. Even when they give me negative feedback. I just like numbers, statistics, etc. However, there is more fun when the game is well designed. The reputation scores quite often are the same when for one week or one month. Or the monthly score can be the same as the quarterly score. Etc. Sometimes this is justified. Most of the time this is an artifact. For instance, this happens always every third month in the case of monthly and quarterly scores.

Thus while we may keep the same names/terminology, we may modify their meaning by considering sliding windows of length 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 365 days. Then the scores will work smoother, and will be more fun to me.

Indeed, the first day or two of a week are reputation-wise not too interesting. The same goes for the first 2 or even 5 days of a month. Furthermore, the monthly scores early in the month do not differ much from the weekly scores, or from the quarterly score early in the quarter, which once again makes the game less fun (to me), less varied. Etc.

Enjoy,

• Thank you, @quid, for adding the reputation tag. Indeed! – Włodzimierz Holsztyński Dec 4 '14 at 7:17
• If the scores should vary smoothly, I find a sliding time window too abrupt. If I wrote a great answer and got a lot of points on the same day, my sliding window score will suddenly fall when the window passes. A sudden rise on the day of answering sounds perfectly fine but the sudden fall is less desirable. I would prefer a weighted sum of daily points over the last $n$ days where the weight goes nicely to zero as day goes to $\text{today}-n$. Perhaps exponential decay with different decay parameters would give a nice collection of slowly varying scores with different time scales. – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 4 '14 at 8:03
• I used in the past and am fond of weighted averages but here I would not exaggerate. I prefer simplicity and the directness (of the meaning of the periodic scores). This would be my preference. Anyway, a high score will vanish in the $7d$-window but will last longer in the $30d$-window, etc. I wanted things smoother, not smooth :-) – Włodzimierz Holsztyński Dec 4 '14 at 9:05
• Thank you @JosephO'Rourke for correcting my orthographic errors. – Włodzimierz Holsztyński Dec 5 '14 at 1:21