What is the percentage listed next to posts in a user's profile?

[hockeyteeth]

I noticed a percentage next to the posts user profile/history. Is this some type of post-rating system? If so, who votes?

[East Hill]

We had that question before...it has to do with how relevant the post is, but I can't remember what the relevancy means!

I'll see if Maelstrom can answer this one (or anyone else who knows more than I do!).

East Hill

[Landgolier]

I noticed a percentage next to the posts user profile/history. Is this some type of post-rating system? If so, who votes?

I haven't been under the hood of the vBulletin software the site runs, but as an amateur database hack, here's what it looks like to me.

When you click on "View more posts by hockeyteeth", rather than querying the database for an exact match on the user name, it runs a keyword search on the field where user names are stored using the same search algorithm it would if you typed "tarck bike" or whatever into a keyword search. So the % is kind of an artifact, it's the same relevance rating the system spits when looking for keywords in larger fields like subject lines or message text. It's the same length for all of a user's posts but it varies with the length of the user's name because the user name field is a certain number of characters in the database (I think 16 but whatev), so a shorter name looks less "relevant" to the software because it fills less of the available space with the content that the search code is looking for. The % isn't just the user name length divided by the field size because for technical reasons not all characters take up the same amount of actual data space, though to be more specific about that I'd have to know how the database is actually set up (and probably need to have a software manual on my lap as well) :)

[Tom Stormcrowe]

You more or less have it right. It's a % of relevance to the search term.

[Maelstrom]

You more or less have it right. It's a % of relevance to the search term.

Yep, think google relevance %, same thing just different degrees of correctness :D