[Theforum] Reviving articles - completely different idea

[John Handelaar]

Just thought I'd chip this one in because we have
experience of this process at ABCtales.com, which now 
has around 12,000 stories.  Although, as you've all
noticed, the problem actually kicks in at about 500.

The story browsing page allows viewers to sort stories
by age, rating, popularity, alpha, genre or whether
they've been 'cherrypicked' (kind of a gold star from
teech thing).  But that doesn't adequately cover things
so I gave them a link marked 'Random Story' which
pulls somehting, anything into view right now.  It's
the most popular link on the site.

In addition to that we were going to (and here's the
big suggestion because we know it'd work at ABCtales)
pull in pseudo-Slashboxes on the right hand side of
the page which pull in one of about 40 top ten lists:

eg.

Top ten by page views
Top ten by rating
most comments
Top ten authors
Ten newest authors
Top ten about CF / PHP / CSS / etc

And then, a slightly more radical idea (and don't let this
one taint your view of what's before this point if you don't
like the sugar-on-top version)

Top ten read by people in the country where you live
Top ten read by people in the same age bracket as you
Top ten read by women/men
Top ten read by people who have the same first language as you

The rationale for these latter ones is this:  imbalances
in demographics are self-reinforcing.  The ratings and page
views by demographics idea came from what I've seen elsewhere:
namely, that at the moment an imbalance in (for example)
gender develops, the voting and the page view counting
generates top-ten lists which lean in that direction.  You
can figure out the rest of the process.

All of this prolly came out of left field a little, but
I'm busier than usual during the week at the moment :-)

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John Handelaar

T +44 20 7209 4117       M +44 7930 681789
F +44 870 169 7657   E john at userfrenzy.com
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