The results of a few SQL experiments gave mixed results. I’ve added a poll at the bottom of this post. I will keep thinking about how this could be implemented. Feel free to propose additional ideas. 
Number of clicks
I just did some queries to see how that would work, and I don’t think it would produce the best topics. Sometimes there are topics that get extra traffic from search engines, and then people click on a link in a post not because it’s the most interesting, but because it was where they landed.
Number of likes
A query by likes isn’t turning up the best results either. A “like” can sometimes convey things other than “this is one of the most interesting posts on the forum that everyone should read.”
Number of bookmarks
This does turn up some interesting content, but I think there isn’t enough data to make it really useful. If more people intentionally use the bookmarking feature as a kind of voting system, then it might work.
A bookmark typically means, “this is useful and I might want to read it again later.”
To bookmark a post, look for the bookmark icon behind the three dots next to the like button. It looks like this:
Average time
I queried by average time spent on topics, and that doesn’t turn up the most relevant content, because sometimes it’s an embedded video that is a little off-topic.
Poll
Please cast a vote:
The “wiki post” refers to this example (you can click the “edit” button on the post to experiment with editing it – it’s just a prototype of an idea at the moment).
- I would be interested in helping to curate “wiki” posts like in the example linked to above.
- I would be interested in “bookmarking” interesting content in order to cast a vote for inclusion in a list of most useful posts.
- I prefer another idea (comment below)