Oh: and based on my front-page scraping, I coded up some command-line tools to return activity / results for domains and members so I could do quick checks on both.
Note that what makes the front-page is an interesting function of both what the member posts and what the membership as a whole responds to. Someone might submit a large number of unappealing topics, but get traction on a much smaller subset. FWIW that seems to be my own experience. My tools will show the posts that got traction, but not the much larger low-vote long tail. Or flagged/killed posts, FWIW.
Note that what makes the front-page is an interesting function of both what the member posts and what the membership as a whole responds to. Someone might submit a large number of unappealing topics, but get traction on a much smaller subset. FWIW that seems to be my own experience. My tools will show the posts that got traction, but not the much larger low-vote long tail. Or flagged/killed posts, FWIW.