Decoding My damn HubPages Score

"'a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.' For some people, a program is only an algorithm if it stops eventually; for others, a program is only an algorithm if it stops before a given number of calculation steps."

Source: Wikipedia

Was up last night and walking like a zombie for drinking too much coffee and then it struck my head like a lightning bolt . Didn't say Eureka like Archimedes. I said: Yo! like Kelly RealHouseWife. I said to myself: Heck no! I'm too tired to write about this sickening scoring, and who cares anyway? Enough with my harp to write some poetry...!

Joining HubPages was like a blessing for many of us. We came from different backgrounds and we found friends with similar goals. But most were talking about this 'gnome' called scoring and its overnight activity,either affecting us or coming to the rescue. Some people, like the older hubbers, always did say that scoring was of not importance. "Just write rich content hubs and avoid being banned."

What is an algorithm, roughly? We don't want to introduce a class in programming in here and get, or sound too complicated. We are not Melbel or Alocsin(jocking) For every action there is a reaction, right? You go to a laundry and want to get quarters from a five dollar bill. Or you just want to go to your local ATM machine and get those 400 dollars to buy groceries and pay the Nannie that was fuming yesterday. Mathematicians created basic algorithms that with a set of instructions will deliver eventually an output. The input would mean the feeding to the instructions. A flowchart would make decisions(IF, YES, NO) and come up with a final output. The ATM will read your Card and will decide if you are the owner, waiting for the next decision making instruction: Enter your PIN. Apparently easy, right? (If, go to, then, loop)

From the beginning, the founders from HP, had this idea of publishing. Paul Edmondson(developer from Hewlett Packard and MSN) and others, had the experience from 'MongoMusic,' which merged with MSN music in 2000. Behind the scenes, they knew about blogging and revenues and search engines. Google was coming up with its AdSense revenue program as well.

All seemed to be perfect and a way of making money was born. The idea was not too bad for any of us. We were around the Internet since 1994 and heard about publishing and Magazines, but a hub? Here they come...programmers to the rescue!! Software Engineers including Paul Deeds, who was responsible for the code base at MongoMusic, and Jay Reitz, tuned up the website and got it going. In the beginning was like a simple page with no input at all, or commentingl. You would come and see an article for days. Just imagine your own blog. Two or three curious commenting on your piece...of art. But the place grew up little by little; and, of course, the first 'cat fight' was born.

The formula came to us like an Easter basket. You look at it and look through those eggs. Yeah, some were already smashed, but nothing is free in life. Here is the formula broken down to the average hubber. Is not an Equation, but is this kind of formula that integrates the numbers associated with the final score. The Score is set by the number of hubs published. Several variables are included. What they told you about visiting the forums and write rich-content and original hubs was right... I see team HP reading us too. Hi Simone!!

S= S/N + V₂RCB ± V₁ FP ± V₂ RC + AC ± %RF ± PCB ±GP

S= Scoring

S/N= Individual scoring of a hub divided by the number of published hubs

RCB= Rich Content Bonus

FP= Forum Participation

RC= Rich engaging answer to a comment: good, bad, poor?

AC= Accolades Bonus.

PCB= Publishing Continuity Bonus: 3 per week? Yes, no?

%RF= Following Ratio = Commenting on hubs that you follow/ Total of hubs you Follow and 'do not comment on.'

V₁= Variable from forum participation.

V₂ = Variable set by moderators(spelling, grammar, punctuation)

GP= Follow or no follow variable set by Panda. Google will review(crawl) rich content and number of hits.

± = negative or positve

This is our personal view of the algorithm. The real formula is way too complicated, including vectors and statistical variables, and also functions inside this c++ language, that get this gnomes to work. Actually we do not need spammers to know the real formula. We keep it like that!

According to Paul Deeds the Ultimate score is based eventually on traffic. Here is the breakdown:

SCORE---(pages views a month)

96-100 - 99.9 percentile (3000 page views a month)
91-95 - 99.3 percentile (2200 page views a month)
86-90 - 97.7 percentile (1300 page views a month)
81-85 - 94th percentile (900 page views a month)
76-80 - 88th percentile (90 page views a month)
71-75 - 78th percentile (30 page views a month)

Hope this can help our new Hubbers and ourselves.