Don't let the bots bring you down, NotATether! 
As a human, I for one applaud your efforts and think its great to see alternative resources being built around forum data. Will remember to add it to my arsenal the next time I am researching something.
As a human, I for one applaud your efforts and think its great to see alternative resources being built around forum data. Will remember to add it to my arsenal the next time I am researching something.Thanks, I appreciate it.
The issue is, I currently don't have a reliable way to measure post quality.
Suggest to look at "user quality". Example post history.
A lot of this kind of user exists. Looked at recent unread topics and this one I found at my third try.
The patterns to look for in this case there are about 1200 posts that all "look" the same:
- Each post begins with a quote.
- Followed by one or two lines of text.
Other things to look for:
- All roughly the same total length.
- All roughly the same number of paragraphs, of the same length.
- Same number of sentences, of the same length.
- Each with for example one image.
All these are in my opinion the result of "forced" content generation. Usually with financial incentive I would assume.
Of course above metric can be gamed. The thing here is that this pattern is predictable. The next posts of above user will also look the same. Introucing more variety in post style will take more effort, and would possibly also be indicative of improved quality.
Noted. I do think, however, that post quality can be quantified somehow, so I'm going to look for some research on how that would be calculated. Probably it should be between 0 and 1.
Then the user quality can be set to the mean of all post qualities from that user, which is then used as a weight for search results, but will not dampen results too much compared to post quality.