Finding topics is very hard currently because most of time the top page of results are exclusively very old archive (from GGroups) topics. Can we can set the search order to boost non-archive topics so topics created recently (since we moved to Discourse) appear first?
For this kind of site I think having a boost on the topic's last modified date would be useful. Something like 60% of the score should exponentially decay with a half-life of 20 days. Wikinews has used that forever and it seems to work well for it. It uses 100 days I think. Its pretty simple to do with Elasticsearch and Lucene Expressions.
The suggested topics should really work the same way. All of my suggested topics are from 2014....
Interesting idea, will keep it in mind next round I do on search. I think a decaying bump is a pretty good idea. Also want to add an option that allows moderators to bump priority for categories.
In the mean time adding order:latest will order by latest which will help a bunch.
https://discuss.elastic.co/search?q=archive%20order%3Alatest