How Spark is calculated

Public trust in a launch board lives or dies on one thing: people believing the ranking is fair. So we're not going to be coy about how Spark works. Here's the whole formula.

The five signals

Every minute, we recompute Spark for each active listing. Five signals feed it, each normalized to a 0–100 scale first so no single one can run away with the score:

• Votes — the obvious one, but only 35% of the weight.
• Clicks — people actually visiting your site. Another 35%.
• Dwell — how long they stick around once they land. 10%.
• Comments — real discussion, not drive-by noise. 10%.
• Maker activity — you showing up and engaging. 10%.

Put together:

Spark = ((votes × 0.35) + (clicks × 0.35) + (dwell × 0.10) +
         (comments × 0.10) + (maker_activity × 0.10)) × decay

Decay keeps it honest

That × decay at the end matters. It halves every 48 hours after your launch day. A launch-day vote brigade gives you a spike, but the spike fades fast — so the listings that climb are the ones still earning attention days later.

You can't coast. You can't buy votes and walk away. The math won't let you.

The 250 line

Cross 250 Spark within your first seven days and your listing is forged ◆ — permanent membership, kept for good.

We won't move the goalposts

The weights above live in one file, spark.ts, and they're frozen. If we ever change them, it ships as Spark v2 with a visible banner and a changelog entry — never a silent tweak. A ranking you can't trust isn't worth ranking on. 🜂