"Popular" tab

[Anachrony]

The "popular" tab on the mod portal has had only 11 pages of results for at least a month, compared to 256 pages for the other categories. And the 11th page is full of mods that have been out for a while with under 1000 total downloads, so it's not cutting it off with the top 11 pages of the most popular mods. It's just omitting most mods for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Before this, the "popular" list was always a bit shorter than the rest and skipping some random mods, but the difference used to be much smaller. It seems completely broken at this point.

[FuryoftheStars]

I wonder if it's using the trending mechanic (now) vs the total download count?

[Loewchen]

Popular counts how many servers are running the mod so it makes sense that only a fraction of all mods is listed.

[Anachrony]

I wonder if it's using the trending mechanic (now) vs the total download count?

It's hard to say now that most mods aren't even rated by that metric anymore. But back when it used to work, it looked to me like it was something close to total downloads divided by number of releases. It definitely skews more towards mods with less frequent releases for some reason. Perhaps an over-reaction to "trending" which spikes up whenever a mod releases an update. The progress going forward on total downloads is relatively unaffected by mod updates, since re-downloads from existing users don't count toward it, so it seems like you could look at the delta on that if you want to reduce the effects of recent updates.

[Anachrony]

Popular counts how many servers are running the mod so it makes sense that only a fraction of all mods is listed.

Oh, OK, that's a bit of a weird metric. It's pretty hopeless trying to play a long modded game with random strangers, so people usually organize that outside of the in-game matchmaking system, such as Discord channels with their own Factorio servers.