"Smoother" recent question count option #13
Description
At the moment, the queue can be sorted by a combined waiting time and questions asked today.
In CSSE2010, the tutors clear the queue at the start of each timetabled session, to allow students who are enrolled in the new session from being disadvantaged, to prevent the queue from getting multiple hours long, and because multiple students would leave at the end of a session anyway, and this avoids the situation where there name is called and naturally they don't respond since they're not in the room, but then the tutor doesn't know if they've left for the day or have just popped out for five minutes.
However, this leads to a situation at busy times where a student asks a few questions during the first session of a day, then they can't get another question for the remainder of the day, due to getting pushed down the queue due to the number of questions they've asked, and because their waiting time will never exceed two hours before the queue is cleared.
As an alternative, instead of setting the recent questions to zero at midnight, instead decrement it by, say, 0.1~0.2 questions per hour (perhaps as a value set for the room). This would mean that after a few hours the student would be able to reach the top of the queue. If it only decremented during class hours, then it could decrement by ~1 question per hour, but that could cause problem if the class schedule isn't accurate.
As a side effect, this would also mean that the first session of the day would be treated the same as sessions later in the day; anybody who asked many questions the previous sessions would be pushed to the end of the end of the queue in the following sessions, regardless of when those sessions occur.