User:MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped)/sandbox

Background
We're building a discussion system with WikiProjects in mind. We want to make it fast and easy to skim through multiple long discussions on a single page and quickly get key information about any topic ( the who, what, and when?) at a glance. (You can check out the full feature set planned for our first release at Flow/MVP.)

Hypothesis
We think including some meta-information about participants at the topic level would be useful for providing a scannable snapshot of that discussion (see images). We can display this information in a number of ways, so we need your help to come up with a sort and display method that makes sense and is useful.

Option 1 - chronological

 * 1st position = Original poster
 * 2nd Position = 2nd Poster
 * 3rd Position = 3rd Poster
 * 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion, who joined in, and when.

Option 2 - by number of topic level posts

 * 1st position = Original poster
 * 2nd Position = Poster with most topic level responses (replies to the topic, not replies to replies)
 * 3rd Position = Poster with second most topic level responses (replies to the topic, not replies to replies)
 * 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion and who's most actively responding to the topic (as opposed to going back and forth on a tangent with another user on the topic).

Option 3 - by total size of posts

 * 1st position = Original poster
 * 2nd Position = Poster with highest level of contribution (bytes)
 * 3rd Position = Poster with second highest level of contribution (bytes)
 * 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion and who's contributed the most text.

Option 4 - by mixture of 2 and 3 and total posts

 * 1st position = Original poster
 * 2nd Position = Poster with highest topic contribution metric (weighted mixture of top level of comments, replies to replies, bytes)
 * 3rd Position = Poster with second highest topic contribution metric (weighted mixture of top level of comments, replies to replies, bytes)
 * 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion and who's most vocal in it (posting the most text, responding to the topic and to other users).

Discuss!
Use the talk page to discuss: '''Which of these would you find useful (and why)? Which wouldn't be useful (and why not)?'''