vancouver islander wrote:It's not so long since SP's "what's new" page was re-jigged to include 15 new Mountains/Rocks and 15 new Routes.
It's now quite common to have as many as 10 or 12 new mountains per DAY. Right now, for instance, there's 11 and the day's not finished yet.
As we all know, once off "what's new", that's pretty well it for most folks in terms of general attention unless their page is lucky enough to tickle Gangolf's fancy and it makes the hallowed and much sought after Front Page.
For us mere mortals, may I suggest that what's new in "Mountains/Rocks" and "Routes" is increased to 20 submissions at the expense for Areas/Ranges and Articles. There are currently 10 of these and they're often there for months and get little attention after the first week or two. 10 is far too many.
Increasing from 15 to 20 the space for new Mountain/Rocks and Routes would be a good start, but I would like to suggest a bolder change.
Everybody seems to agree that
Areas, Mountains & Routes are the substance of SP, but only one single line is attributed to the new contributions under "what's new" for these categories. The information is so basic (name and submission date only ) that it is not possible to make a direct selection on what interests you, so you forcefully have to click first on the "More" icon to open a new page with the 50 latest submission, this time with a lot of details allowing you to click on what is of your interest.
To the opposite, new
images, comments & summit log entries are given a disproportional importance with a large field including a pictures and lots of information. First I don’t think that objects such as
comments deserve to be given so much importance (the receiver of the comment will anyway have it displayed on his/her profile page), and similar thoughts can be made for
image and
summit logs. Secondly, the frequency of such new submissions (
images, comments & summit log entries) is so high that in any case it will disappear from the “what’s new” page after a couple of hours, if not earlier. So unless you are compulsively pressing the “what’s new” button every five minutes, the “average” regular member will anyway miss at least 90% of these new entries. And the new
comments and
log entries are definitely buried (there is no “more” button for these categories) in a few hours, as soon as they are replaced by the newest 20 entries.
So my suggestion, if our chief engineer Montana Mad has access to the secret codes, would be to revamp the “what’s new page” in the following way, from top to down, always including a “more” button for each category, leading to the current list:
1) New Area & Ranges: 10 fields (e.g. in 2 columns) including picture, name, author, elevation, location, date of creation.
2) New Mountain & Rocks: same as for Area & Range, but with 20 fields
3) New Routes: same as for Mountain & rocks, and include route type
4) New Articles: 6 fields, including picture, name, author, date of creation
Etc, etc with new lists, trips reports, canyons, trailheads, custom objects, huts and albums (details to be adjusted).
And at the bottom, if found necessary, the new images, comments and summit logs, but with only 3-4 fields allocated to each category (currently 15-20), but with a clickable “more” button for those interested in browsing all new entries since their last visit.
I’m quite convince that with such a change giving more prominence to the new
Area, Mountain and Routes, the average “lazy” member would be much more attracted to visit more frequently and pay more attention to these new submissions.