Hi Fibonacci,

[…] why one wants to weight the threads accordingly to number of views or replies.

The reason for me personally is to allow for analysis such as:

1. Which posts have most views to determine popularity and turning into a separate page or category

At the bottom of my forum you can see that at any given time most visitors are search engine’s bots. Don’t ask me for the code, tricky. Since bots index the entire forum, the number of views does not represent popularity but age. See f.i. the currently last page in my forum where every post got thousands of views. If one would be able to sort by the views one would mainly get uninteresting & likely hopelessly outdated stuff.
Another example: If have a post ▼ Read before registering ▼ pinned on top of the main page. It gives potential users some information (links to procedures, technical stuff, ). Of course is has to be in a public category. Since it’s on top of the page it got 51,000+ “views”. I guess that in my scientific field <5,000 people are active and not all of them are interested in exchanging ideas in a forum. Hence, these views came from silicon based life-forms.

2. Which posts have most replies same as above but also to maybe clean redundant useless replies.

IMHO, sorting by the number of replies might be a good idea. It may give a visitor an idea which threads are at least controversial (not necessarily important).

3. Which posts has little views and or little replies to allow for deletion or clean up.

As above (if the number of replies are concerned).

The above is mainly for review and maintenance of forum.

I would never delete any post if it got no reply (yet). In my experience sometimes users dig out rather old stuff – which brings the thread to the main page anyway. I never delete a post unless it is clearly spam or violates the forum’s policy. Rule: There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.

Also as a reader i assume one would like to know which topics are popular so i can read them to see what or why they are popular in views or replies.

As above. On the other hand, sometimes even a single answer is sufficient.
I would say: Lot of replies = controversial issue, few replies = easy stuff. However, the latter might still be important and very helpful as well.

Again i apologies if i seem over zealous with MLF.

No worries.

[…] by accident i found MLF and am a little excited by it.

So am I.