What are your ideas for new ordering methods? My current idea is:
1. For each topic, get a list of the distinct users who posted there in the last 24 hours.
2. Give the topic a score equal to the sum of each such user's total earned merit.
3. Sort by topic score descending, and secondarily by the usual last post time.
I like this idea. The only problem as you mentioned is that some users would have too much influence.
To reduce this a simple formula could be applied to reduce the weight of individual users, for example getting the sume of the
square root of each user's total earned merit (or log or similar), or there can be a table of merit range correlated with a specific amount of awarded points, so newbies with no merit aren't counted but no one counts too much.