Top Questions filters vs. All Questions filters

Question

I understand the stack home page shows the Top Questions and the Questions link shows All Questions. This makes sense to me. What makes less sense are the filters under each view. Why are there different filters, and aren't some of them redundant or unnecessary? It's confusing to me, and it seems like it's almost a mistake that each view has an entirely differently (but similar) set of filters.

All Questions has these filters:

• Newest
• Featured
• Frequent
• Votes
• Active
• Unanswered

Top Questions has these filters:

• Active
• Featured
• Hot
• Week
• Month

For Top Questions, what defines Hot, Week, and Month? Doesn't the question have to be "Hot" to be Top to begin with? If Hot means "Frequent" or "Votes," shouldn't we use those terms instead -- so that there is more uniformity between the sets of filter labels? If there is justification for the label names being what they are, is there at least a way to add a mouseover tooltip that describes what each filter means?

Answer 1

Jeff Atwood gives the algorithm for determining what makes a question hot in What formula should be used to determine “hot” questions? over at MSE:

(log(Qviews)*4) + ((Qanswers * Qscore)/5) + sum(Ascores)
--------------------------------------------------------
((QageInHours+1) - ((QageInHours - Qupdated)/2)) ^ 1.5`

He says

This algorithm will heavily favor questions with LOTS of answers, as the sum(Ascores) are now included -- one assumes if there are lots of answers, there will be a lot more voting on the answers, too.

This is in contrast to Active, which is based solely on the most recent creation or modification time to a question or its answers.

As ColleenV notes, week and month refer to questions which are hot over the last week or month. Week and month according to Week is not a useful default for the /users page refer to the calendar week and month, likewise quarter and year; they are not rolling totals. The week is a U.S. week, i.e. beginning Sunday at 00:00:000 UTC and not Monday. The SE day starts at UTC 00:00.