Comment by quokka

I don't understand. The definition of order is

  s = score(ups, downs)
  order = log10(max(abs(s), 1))

and the poster says that "order will always be positive". But that isn't true. It is the logarithm of a number in (0,1], and so is negative or zero. Since we cut the value off at 1 I assume that the score function does something to the votes beyond (ups - downs), scaling the value in a way that makes the logarithm of the score interesting.