Ranked list of most-downloaded files?

[Spooniest]

I thought it would be interesting if we were able to view a list of the #of times downloaded for all patches on the site, ranked in order from most downloaded to least downloaded.

Is this a feature that can be implemented, or is this too tedious/not practical?

If it is unworkable for some reason, I'll 

[Nightcrawler]

Our system can already do this per section on a technical level, however there is purposely no public interface to it for much the same reason we don't allow listing by the rating system as described here.

To illustrate this point, since we've formally tracked downloads for all items, the two most downloaded items are:

A Dragon Ball Z translation
A Cave Story Map Editor

Observations:

• They are many magnitudes more popular than say your FF6 hack or any of my translations, and will put our work at the bottom of such lists permanently.
• Since the Dragon Ball Z translation is new, it has an unfair advantage by default to hundreds of old files in place before the recent download counting began.
• Apparently Cave Story's popularity in the indie PC gaming scene eclipses that of all of ROM hacking. Because we carry that editor here, it eclipses all pure ROM hacking utilities in popular lists permanently.

These are just a few reasons of why we want to distance ourselves from popularity features. Instead of feeding the herd, we'd rather go against the grain to try and provide equal opportunity for exposure of all works. There are many excellent items on this site with magnitudes of fewer downloads that would be perceived as not worth trying. We don't want them permanently buried underneath Dragon Ball Z or fringe items such as Cave Story Editors that are hardly ROM hacking tools.

Does that make sense?

[Kiyoshi Aman]

I think a better solution would be to build a ranking, then randomly choose entries, weighted toward the bottom of the ranking, and offer it as "a selection of &pluralize($entry_type)".

[Validus]

yay! my Captain Tsubasa 3 translation has over a 100 downloads!

ENJOY MY SPANISH FRIENDS!