All-time top questions

Question

At Workplace, and any SE site for that matter, you can choose to sort questions in a number of ways. There's active, featured, hot, top questions this week, and top questions this month. Why isn't there a list of top questions of all time? I think it would be useful, particularly for someone new who just wants to browse. It also would make some of the often-duplicated questions easier to find without keeping them in favorites.

Would it be possible to create this feature (maybe for all of SE)? Or maybe there's already a way to view this that I don't know about?

A similar list could maybe be created for all-time best answers, though I'm sure there would be a lot of overlap between the two lists.

Answer 1

Do you mean this? Questions sorted by vote count. If you click on "Questions" you see some other sort options.

Those sort options don't exist if you hit the main homepage here, though...

You can also search all answers based on vote count. I'm not sure you can more easily find that, though I use the "is:question" and "is:answer" search criteria pretty often. That pulls up a few other sort criteria.

Answer 2

There is the Greatest Hits list. I don't know where it's linked (if anywhere!), but somebody tipped me off about it a while back and I just construct the URL myself (sitname/questions/greatest-hits). There's more information about it in an old post on The Overflow blog which states:

For better or worse, these questions are what the world will see and remember your site for...

What makes a question a Greatest Hit? This is a little vague, but the page there says:

Questions that got a large amount of views or a large amount of feedback.

The current algorithm divides the number of page views with the total amount of question and answer feedback received (adding a bonus for high view counts), excluding questions with less views than the median :- X.

(The median of the number of views 'X' is dynamically calculated.)

I believe the "feedback" it's talking about is the anonymous feedback that is generated if somebody who's not logged in clicks on a voting button.