Nothing like that on my end...

I'm fairly certain topics are tagged as "hot" when they get so many posts over all. That way, even zombie topics that are just barely surviving the revival rule can retain their hotness.

Yeah that seems to be the case - how long has it been like that? I only just noticed that like 80% of the topics I see are marked Hot.

Evidently you've not ventured much into forums like BBC, where a hot topic is a member of an endangered species.

~B~

Or perhaps its G&T you've been wandering into, in which hot topics go for a dime a dozen.

Makes me feel there should be a slightly more sophisticated criteria for determining what makes a topic hot or not.