From what I can see, “Hot” seems like a boosted “New” — it favors new posts, and ranks them by activity [1.1], whereas, from what I understand, “Active”, is more like the classic forum format where a comment bumps it back up to the top, but ranked also based on score [1.2].
Right so they both use time and they both use activity, but in my experience Hot prioritizes newness more while the top posts in Active tend to be slightly older, having had more time to make the rounds to where more people know about it, and then the activity comes from new people seeing it but also from notifications among people that already saw it - e.g. on this OP where we are doing that now.:-)
From what I can see, “Hot” seems like a boosted “New” — it favors new posts, and ranks them by activity [1.1], whereas, from what I understand, “Active”, is more like the classic forum format where a comment bumps it back up to the top, but ranked also based on score [1.2].
References
Right so they both use time and they both use activity, but in my experience Hot prioritizes newness more while the top posts in Active tend to be slightly older, having had more time to make the rounds to where more people know about it, and then the activity comes from new people seeing it but also from notifications among people that already saw it - e.g. on this OP where we are doing that now.:-)