SummitPost.org

SoCalHiker wrote:

Bob Sihler wrote:In the meantime, what about a thread to recommend certain pics? It could be cleaned daily to avoid confusion. We could set parameters about what kinds of pics to recommend, and interested members might have an easier time finding those harder-to-find candidates.

Any thoughts?

sounds like worth a try...

lol... like the idea or not based on today's POTD it looks like the idea has some potential to have an influence.

Yeah, Liba wasn't kidding when she said she'd be doing some "ice climbing" this year.

butitsadryheat wrote:I kind of liked the idea of a rotating photo w/ each page load, but only pulled form those photos over a set percentage, like 88% or so. It requires a moderate number of votes to reach that, and has a tendency to weed out the crap

Yeah, that actually is a good idea the more I think of it, but 88%, which sounds like a reasonable number, may be too high. Yesterday, only seven pictures had that high a score, but 51 had 87% or better, which might be too many. Maybe 87.5% would work. And it would still be nice to see it function so that only a person's highest-rated pic that day could be featured; otherwise, the clique members would still flood the site so their pics could be randomly displayed a lot. And with such a filter, maybe we could lower it to 87% to boost the number of different people featured.

The more I think of it, the more I think that idea (was it mrchad9 or SoCal Hiker who proposed that, or someone else?) might be the best one.

Bob Sihler wrote:Yeah, that actually is a good idea the more I think of it, but 88%, which sounds like a reasonable number, may be too high. Yesterday, only seven pictures had that high a score, but 51 had 87% or better, which might be too many. Maybe 87.5% would work. And it would still be nice to see it function so that only a person's highest-rated pic that day could be featured; otherwise, the clique members would still flood the site so their pics could be randomly displayed a lot. And with such a filter, maybe we could lower it to 87% to boost the number of different people featured.

The more I think of it, the more I think that idea (was it mrchad9 or SoCal Hiker who proposed that, or someone else?) might be the best one.

If you do that, I think it is a great idea to limit it to one per SP member, otherwise we all see mostly photos of the same people as you mentioned. But again, if you base it on the votes, many very good photos that were submitted at the end of the day will fall through the cracks because there was simply not enough time to gather the "required" votes.

I don't know whether it's possible to update the "rotation" every 3 hours maybe. E.g. if it's 3pm show the photos (above a certain predetermined score) that were submitted in the past 24 hours (3pm the previous day). At 6pm show photos who were submitted from 6pm the previous day. Don't make it solely dependent on the past calendar day. You will "loose" some very nive photos that way.

Bob Sihler wrote:

butitsadryheat wrote:I kind of liked the idea of a rotating photo w/ each page load, but only pulled form those photos over a set percentage, like 88% or so. It requires a moderate number of votes to reach that, and has a tendency to weed out the crap

Yeah, that actually is a good idea the more I think of it, but 88%, which sounds like a reasonable number, may be too high. Yesterday, only seven pictures had that high a score, but 51 had 87% or better, which might be too many. Maybe 87.5% would work. And it would still be nice to see it function so that only a person's highest-rated pic that day could be featured; otherwise, the clique members would still flood the site so their pics could be randomly displayed a lot. And with such a filter, maybe we could lower it to 87% to boost the number of different people featured.

The more I think of it, the more I think that idea (was it mrchad9 or SoCal Hiker who proposed that, or someone else?) might be the best one.

My main proposal was a time limit to get POTD twice, and to use the other spot for a random photo, which phlipdascrip proposed in the the OP. But I think I first suggested that the random photo would be better with some sort of criteria, however loose, so it isn't totally random.

To address the issue SoCalHiker brings up, instead of going by a calendar day, you could either go by a 24 hour period (probably possible with the script) or could go by a 2 calendar day period. This might let you use a little higher score, and either should work well regardless of when a photo is submitted (especially if it is limited to one per member). But you'd have to delay the selection a day, so a photo submitted anytime Monday would be in the pool for Wednesday. Yet, I bet we see a handful of folks submitting one photo per day (since in this scenario, it is actually easier for these folks to get featured status).

This link (from the front page) shows photos submitted today and on the previous calendar day. Later on in the day photos submitted today, and yesterday evening, will creep onto it. There isn't a way I know of to show the last 24 hours, just this calendar day as in the previous link, or the link below.

http://www.summitpost.org/object_list.p ... ct_3=score

mrchad9 wrote:

SoCalHiker wrote:

Bob Sihler wrote:In the meantime, what about a thread to recommend certain pics? It could be cleaned daily to avoid confusion. We could set parameters about what kinds of pics to recommend, and interested members might have an easier time finding those harder-to-find candidates.

Any thoughts?

sounds like worth a try...

lol... like the idea or not based on today's POTD it looks like the idea has some potential to have an influence.

I really like that, one more vote for it!

Numbers (87%, 87,5% or 88%): i think wouldn't be fair to some folks.

Sometimes people upload images but don't attach it to any album or mountain page and the photo is automatically lost in time in a couple hours, i have some good examples myself and i saw a lot of great, great photos suffer from that end. I have photos that deserved at lest 88% but they not even got to 87%!
Here's one of them: http://www.summitpost.org/abrolhos-as-s ... 2/c-679465
It barely got to 86,88%! hehehe
Is it so bad? Is it a shity photo? Does anybody dislike me? No ahahahahah
But the picture just didn't got the point, so what?

Yes, i like the idea of one of my photos to be at the front page. I did it already three times. I was happy and all but still one missing, a photo from a brazilian mountain on the front page. After that i'll be satisfied, truly happy so to speak.

Sometimes that happens, i won't be sad or anything. But some people could be. I'm here to share! If my photos don't make it for POTD so what? I won't get sick or nothing like that ahahahahah

Just a thought! I don't think that pick the photo by the points will work.

Cheers folks! I like this thread....very good points here!

Bob Sihler wrote:In the meantime, what about a thread to recommend certain pics? It could be cleaned daily to avoid confusion. We could set parameters about what kinds of pics to recommend, and interested members might have an easier time finding those harder-to-find candidates.

Any thoughts?

Yes and in this thread we can all vote for which picture we think is best, and then the highest ranked wins! Oh, wait........

if you base it on the votes, many very good photos that were submitted at the end of the day will fall through the cracks because there was simply not enough time to gather the "required" votes.

A solution to that is the POTH idea I had, but then you have to try to control for the manipulators and keeping pictures of people's hiking boots off the front page.

Your other solution soudns complicated to me, but I'm not the one who writes and understands these codes, so maybe it's easier than it sounds.

Whatever happens (if anything does), it should be better than the current system at least.

Bob Sihler wrote:Whatever happens (if anything does), it should be better than the current system at least.

of course, but almost anything would be better....

... or post a link on the frontpage that leads to a page where the ten highest scored photos (and maybe only one per member) for the past 24 hours (updated maybe every 3 hours) are featured...

So many good ideas have already been proposed to improve the current ill-designed and manipulation-prone POTD/POTW, but I would also like to add my two cents... In order of preference:

Option 1. Get ride out of the photo exhibition from the front page, and use the two slots currently allocated to photos to display recently updated objects (e.g. mountain pages) or elder submissions worth being featured again. I know that elder area/mountain/route pages are sometimes featured again, but this is relatively rare (currently none of the six featured pages). Reserving slots for that might guaranty a more frequent appearance.
Alternatively (or combined with the upper proposal), It would be nice to see other worthy objects such as fact sheets and lists featured on the front page. For example, the following contributions could easily make it on the front page:
http://www.summitpost.org/handy-alpine-grade-facts/173430
http://www.summitpost.org/great-map-sources/183131
http://www.summitpost.org/8000m-peaks/171372
http://www.summitpost.org/conversion-tables-of-climbing-grades/186649
http://www.summitpost.org/volcanic-seven-summits/171202
http://www.summitpost.org/the-snow-leopards/235234
http://www.summitpost.org/seven-summits/171144
http://www.summitpost.org/u-s-state-highpoints/171191
http://www.summitpost.org/ultra-prominence-peaks-of-the-48-states/174556
http://www.summitpost.org/colorado-13ers/185947
http://www.summitpost.org/best-mountaineering-literature/257435
http://www.summitpost.org/colorado-14ers-in-winter/337648
http://www.summitpost.org/grading-hiking-routes/187254
http://www.summitpost.org/russian-alpine-grades/178646

Option 2. As for option 1, use the two slots currently allocated to photos in order to display other worthy objects. Add some new horizontal slots at the bottom of the front page (below the featured articles) for the featured photos, using the same width as for the article/TR. I guess there would be space for three slots allocated to photos, one more than currently, and this could be used in the following way: 1 slot for POTD (see below for criteria), 1 slot for a random picture (see below for criteria), 1 slot for an old high quality picture.

Option 3. Keep the front page layout as it is now, and modify the criteria in the following way (this is not far from what appeared to be the most consensual opinion amongst the different proposals made in this thread):

1) One slot for POTD, using the following criteria
• A necessary change is to allow 24 hours for all pictures before it is automatically selected as POTD. As mentioned by other members, the current algorithm takes the highest voted picture during a calendar day (using UTC-5 or North American Eastern Time Zone as reference), meaning that a picture posted at 11pm will only have 1 hour to be voted, while a picture posted at 1am will have 23 hours. Last year I made a check of 50 consecutive POTD, and noticed that the median posting time was 1:39am (!). As an example, the new algorithm should ideally select for the POTD posted on 22 November the picture posted on 20 November which has gained the highest score within the first 24 hours after being posted (which is different from selecting the highest picture posted on 20)
• Facultative additional criteria (Bob Sihler's proposal): only select a photo which is attached to a newly submitted object (range, mountain, route, TR, article, etc. excluding albums). I personally think that it is too exclusive, with the additional risk of sub-standard or useless new contributions (e.g TR) created just for the sake of featuring the new pictures.
• Another facultative criteria (Mr. Chad's proposal): create a period of e.g. 30 days during which a member cannot have a second POTD featured. Initially I did not like the idea (sounds discriminatory), but this actually appears as the best option to limit the current abusive use of the voting system by certain. We should also consider this idea from the point of view of increased diversity, which can only be beneficial to SummitPost. The same is happening for mountain/route pages submitted by some prolific members: e.g. Dow William is certainly the best route contributor, but even though his new pages are of the highest quality, they will not all be displayed on the front page in order to increase the diversity of the site.

2) One slot for a random "good" picture, using the following criteria
• A quality threshold (e.g. 87 or 87.5) is necessary to make an initial screening.
• The random picture should not be a way to increase someone's probability to be featured as POTD (otherwise this would soon lead to new manipulations of the system). This means that any random picture displayed should be at least 24 hours old.
• I would suggest Matt to add a few "undisclosed" parameters in the algorithm, so that it is not predictable which picture will be featured. For example including old "high quality" pictures, giving higher probability to pictures linked to recently created objects, limiting the number of pictures per member that could potentially be featured, etc.
• The "random" picture may change at a frequency shorter than 24 hours, or even for each upload of the front page.

Lots of good ideas throughout this thread. My two bits:

1. What's the purpose for featuring anything? The featured articles, mountains, and TRs seem to serve people who visit only once a week or less, and need to present an attractive face for the site. The photos seem to serve those of us who log on several times a day, so variety is important for that group.

2. There's clear time zone bias. I know I tend to upload at 5am or so, which is a really slow time on both sides of the Atlantic. That 1:39am slot is really busy. The solution is to use shorter windows (3 hours), which also provides variety. POTH was too short -- there are times when you get POTH with zero votes. I also like Bruno's idea about a 24-hour "qualifying" period.

3. Voting cliques. I'm afraid this requires a heavy-handed response if we want variety -- enough Trangos & Italian Alps! An easy software solution is to limit each member to one per week or month, though I'm afraid we may see some avatars appear.

4. POTW. Get rid of it, it's boring to see the same picture for a week. POTD is barely OK.

5. It might be fun to have a "classic" photo or two -- randomly choose one of the 10/20/50 best photos from this day one year ago, with a new draw on each refresh. This serves the goal of variety.

6. Don't put the restriction on other types of pages -- I'm OK seeing new routes from Dow all the time. If somebody else writes good routes (and many do), the playing ground seems level enough.

I am assuming by 'What's the purpose for featuring anything?' you meant 'What's the purpose for featuring any photo?' right?

mrchad9 wrote:I am assuming by 'What's the purpose for featuring anything?' you meant 'What's the purpose for featuring any photo?' right?

Actually, "anything" = "anything"

I don't mean this in the "what's the sense of living any more?" tone but in the sense of "to know what to do, we need to know what our goals are." Why do we feature things at all? I took a stab at the question.

SP could just have a stock welcome page with an "About SP" and "FAQ." Bad idea IMHO, but imagining alternatives is useful, I think.