SummitPost.org

Just curious as to why, since the big changes to the site, nothing seems to change here-Same trip reports, same articles, month after month.
No offense meant to the members who posted these TRs and articles but I think that everyone that wanted to know what really happened to Charity Stevens on Mount Shasta figured that out long ago.

Just curious........

We used to have a rotation schedule for elves to change stuff on the front page, but I'm not sure that it has been followed in a long time.

Are you volunteering to help with it? We could use some more help with this aspect of the site it seems.

Automate it... so that if a trip report or article meets certain thresholds... like a specific number of votes, or page views, and has a certain number of pictures or whatever... it is automatically featured. I would guess this is how larger platforms manage this part of their content.

mrchad9 wrote:Automate it... so that if a trip report or article meets certain thresholds... like a specific number of votes, or page views, and has a certain number of pictures or whatever... it is automatically featured. I would guess this is how larger platforms manage this part of their content.

Great idea.

You could also take into account how much interest each individual picture in the TR/article generated.

I'd suggest putting them up for two weeks and call it good. Agree with ZeeJay and mrchad9 - choose the next batch by interest/votes. If it doesn't reach a certain threshold, post good ones from the past. There's plenty of those out there!

How about if timing of rotation is dependent upon whether or not other new pages meet the threshold. i.e. if none meet the threshold, then leave things up for 1-2 weeks, otherwise 3-4 days so that more pages have a chance to be featured.

ZeeJay wrote:How about if timing of rotation is dependent upon whether or not other new pages meet the threshold. i.e. if none meet the threshold, then leave things up for 1-2 weeks, otherwise 3-4 days so that more pages have a chance to be featured.

I featured a few articles myself a few weeks ago when I noticed they weren't being updated. I tried to choose articles and trip reports that had never been featured before. I was surprised at how many had been featured before. It took a lot of digging to find one that hadn't already been featured. I suppose it would be OK to feature the same few dozen trip reports and articles on a rotating basis since many people are viewing the site for the first time or miss seeing the front page for several weeks, so even if they'd been featured before the articles or TRs would be new to most people.

Montana Matt wrote:I featured a few articles myself a few weeks ago when I noticed they weren't being updated. I tried to choose articles and trip reports that had never been featured before. I was surprised at how many had been featured before. It took a lot of digging to find one that hadn't already been featured.

Matt, even if it's not a task of mine, i also featured a few articles from time to time when I noticed that they had not been changed on the front page for a long time and I also found the same: many of thems had already been selected. The real problem is that since a long time there are few contributors creating articles, so it's difficult to select new ones.

Silvia Mazzani wrote:The real problem is that since a long time there are few contributors creating articles, so it's difficult to select new ones.

Yes, I think we should start re-featuring articles at this point. This site is old enough that most new members or visitors to the website probably haven't seen many of the previously featured articles.

FYI, there are 192 pages (I think 30 to a page) of TRs, but only 14 pages of articles, so yes, please recycle.

IMHO - Sounds like articles aren't a strong feature of this site. Perhaps they don't deserve to be shown on equal footing with trip reports. Mountain or area pages might be a better fit for that prime slot. Plenty of those I'm thinking.
Don't know the mechanics of changing it, I suppose it might be too involved. Makes more sense to me though.

Bill Reed wrote:IMHO - Sounds like articles aren't a strong feature of this site. Perhaps they don't deserve to be shown on equal footing with trip reports. Mountain or area pages might be a better fit for that prime slot. Plenty of those I'm thinking.
Don't know the mechanics of changing it, I suppose it might be too involved. Makes more sense to me though.

It wouldn't be hard at all to change what content is shown on the front page. I don't know why it was decided to show articles there...I suppose to generate interest to write them or because there were some very good ones written and Josh and/or Ryle or one or more of the elves at the time the decision was made thought it would be valuable to show them.

If people have suggestions or feedback about what content is displayed on the front page (the look is going to change as well because it doesn't look good on mobile devices), please feel free to make suggestions.