DEV's Community Hub Ranked RSS Bots as Top Authors Due to Volume-Based Query

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A DEV Community user noticed that the Community Hub's 'Popular Community Members' section was topped by automated RSS syndication accounts publishing hundreds of posts with almost no reactions. The cause was a ranking query that ignored whether posts were imported from feeds and used post volume as a tie-breaker over real engagement. The fix proposed was to exclude feed-imported posts, rank by human reactions, and filter out suspended or spam users. However, an automated review revealed that chaining the role-exclusion filters produced a nested subquery that raised the PostgreSQL planner cost about 4.4 times over the baseline. The episode illustrates how popularity metrics can break when volume is measured instead of engagement.

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