SummitPost.org

vancouver islander wrote: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.

Never had anything to do with the featured mountains / routes / areas on the front page. Just the tr / articles guy ...

I'd like to see small photo icons and author credit for Mtns, Areas, and Routes. I certainly don't need them for Custom Objects, and I don't miss them for Huts.

At the moment, 15 Mountain slots only last us a couple of days. I think a good length of time for new Mountains to be visible is about a week, but as that would require a lot of space, I suggest doubling the Mountain slots to 30. The number of Route and Area slots currently seems sufficient (8 days and one month respectively), as does the number of Trip Report slots (about a week).

Albums are created at a huge rate but most aren't too valuable to me. (A bit like comments and climber's logs - I do check them once in a while but I like the fact that they're buried at the bottom of the page.) I'm not sure what the right number is for Albums - a small number would make the listing completely ephemeral, but I'd rather not give up the space needed for a longer listing.

Some categories are nearly empty, constituting a waste of screen space. Canyons, Lists, Trailheads, Huts, and Custom Objects could all be combined into an "Other" category taking up no more than 30 slots.

I would put 25 or so slots for Mountains and for Routes, keep them the same length. I would just leave everything else as is.

If we have pictures, author credit, and such, isn't that the same as clicking the 'More' link that is already there? Then the list is as long as you could want.

Many good suggestions above. What I'd like to add is that what should really be valued and honoured on SP is how mountain, route, area etc. pages are being updated, maintained. How the owner manages to cooperate with other members. There are great examples of this, but there are also many members who attempt to attract attention only posting new pages and never updating them. How many of you are doing the tedious job of adding less important pieces of information on existing pages, being aware that rarely anybody will notice that? But we also have visitors who come on SP, search for let's say Aconcagua, and then it's very important do they find the version from 2002 od from 2010. Luckilly we can be proud of Aconcagua page...

I like the idea of 25 mountains and routes as well, and I think it would be better to reduce the numbers in some of the other categories that don't see much movement so that the page won't drag on so long.

I also agree that the picture/author is nice but not totally necessary since you can find that by clicking on "More."

Vid Pogachnik wrote:Many good suggestions above. What I'd like to add is that what should really be valued and honoured on SP is how mountain, route, area etc. pages are being updated, maintained. How the owner manages to cooperate with other members. There are great examples of this, but there are also many members who attempt to attract attention only posting new pages and never updating them. How many of you are doing the tedious job of adding less important pieces of information on existing pages, being aware that rarely anybody will notice that? But we also have visitors who come on SP, search for let's say Aconcagua, and then it's very important do they find the version from 2002 od from 2010. Luckilly we can be proud of Aconcagua page...

Agree with you. Maybe one option would be to create a new "Recently updated" category in the "What's new" page, where all newly updated areas, mountains, routes, trailheads, canyons, etc. will be listed (recently modified articles, TR, and similars shouldn't be included in the listing, as usually these objects are not updated beyond spelling correction).

Advantage: it would give more visibility to the recently updated objects, much easier to access them than using the advance search tool (selecting "ordered by last edited date" would give the same result, but you need to do it for each category).

Risk. Some members in desesperate need of advertisement might be tempted to correct a couple of typos every week in order to have their submissions appearing in the list, but if they are happy so... Beyond this I don't see any problem with a box for "recently updated" objects. And it is probably not too difficult to implement for our chief programmer (time needed apart...).

In order not to have recently created objects appearing in this "updated" list, the programming code could only select the updated objects whose creation date is older than two years (or one year). I made a rapid check and found that 25 mountains and routes older than 2 years (43 if we put the threshhold at 1 year) have been updated over the past 7 days. So having space for 20-30 objects should be enough.

Bruno_Tibet wrote:Risk. Some members in desesperate need of advertisement might be tempted to correct a couple of typos every week in order to have their submissions appearing in the list, but if they are happy so...

Not a trivial problem. I make tiny corrections in my pages whenever they occur to me. I wouldn't want them popping up every time on a "recently updated" list, with people like Bruno thinking I was just "in desperate need" of attention. So I'd probably avoid making the little tweaks. If this feature submitting the page to a "recently updated" list was automatic, it could end up being counterproductive.

chugach mtn boy wrote:

Bruno_Tibet wrote:Risk. Some members in desesperate need of advertisement might be tempted to correct a couple of typos every week in order to have their submissions appearing in the list, but if they are happy so...

Not a trivial problem. I make tiny corrections in my pages whenever they occur to me. I wouldn't want them popping up every time on a "recently updated" list, with people like Bruno thinking I was just "in desperate need" of attention. So I'd probably avoid making the little tweaks. If this feature submitting the page to a "recently updated" list was automatic, it could end up being counterproductive.

Agree with you, and sorry if I expressed myself ambiguously, but I really did not want to suggest that people appearing often in a “recently updated” list should be stigmatised as “attention seekers”. I actually also do same like you (as probably most members) and proceed to minor updates (re-establishing broken links, adding/removing a sentence, improving the layout) whenever it occurs to me.

My point regarding a possible risk was rather that in case the number of updates suddenly grows from let’s say 25-50 per week (currently) to for example 100-200 per week, then the “recently updated” list would become much too long and would lose its meaning.

The difficulty, as indirectly pointed out by your comment, is that it is virtually impossible to differentiate minor corrections from major updates. At least with the current coding, unless you could tick a kind of checkbox (minor/major update) while editing your pages. So better forget about my suggestion, it was just a not very successful attempt to address Vid’s concern.
Cheers,
Bruno