Sort By 'Rating'

I was looking through some of the fics in the shipping folders today and, as was my wont, I decided to sort them all by 'rating'. When I did so, I got to wondering, what exactly is the criteria used when sorting the fics in this way? I had originally thought it would be done by counting purely the number of upvotes. However, it soon became apparent that this is not the case. There were countless stories which had been upvoted only a few hundred times appearing above stories that had thousands of upvotes.

This was a confusing revelation at first but then I realised that that wouldn't be a reasonable criteria for sorting by rating. A story which has 100 up and 100 down is obviously not rated as highly as a story which has 50 up and 2 down. So I checked to see if it was aggregate up/downvotes. It wasn't. Now, since I'm the sort of person who needs an answer to a question once it has been posed, I was forced in to doing something that I'm not proud of.

Frustrated, I did a series of highly complex mathematics, calculating all sorts of ratios and relationships between the raw data I had available including upvotes, downvotes, views, favourites and individual views. After coming up empty, I bashed my head against my desk trying to fathom what this was based on. As I write this, I still haven't the foggiest. I even tried to troll the site by looking at the source, but there was no gem of insight hidden within that either.

If anyone knows how this is worked out, please tell me. I will eventually forget about it, but the second I sort some stories again, I'll remember. This is messing with my head.

In other news, I've been working on the plan for my Sweetie Belle story and I've hunted down some cover art too. I plan on starting the writing process some time in the next couple of weeks once my entourage of proof-readers and editors okay it. I say entourage. There's two of them and they're wonderful chaps/chapettes. With a bit of luck, you'll be seeing the first few chapters of that fairly soon.