HOT Topics

[Cal]

Here's my idea.  There should be someway to quickly find the HOT topics of the day.  For example, who could ever forget Lybi's infamous Weight Watcher's discussion... (Does that one still hold the record for comments?)

I propose that anyone's blog that has more than 10 comments in a day becomes a HOT topic, and then they are displayed in descending order.  (in a fashion similar to LOST SHEEP or LONE FAITHFULS)  That way anyone can tune in and give their 2 cents worth.

[Sasha Pachev]

Great idea. On the TODO list, and being easy, should be done fairly soon.

[Scott Zincone]

I agree this is a good idea.  It can help you get a peek into a blog you may not have normally browsed.

[Sasha Pachev]

Done.

[Jon Allen]

What happened to the hot comments section?  I was wanting to look at Nevel's 260 post page, and comment on MaryAnn's 60 post page, and found the Hot Topics box has disappeared.  And MaryAnn's blog is missing.

[Josse]

And the top runner's are gone.  What is up with that?

[Sasha Pachev]

I will not be maintaining Top Runner's anymore for a number of reasons. One is time. It takes a while to validate a claim to a certain performance, then figure out what it was worth. I could do it when we did not have many people, and I did not have as many kids, but now we have reached the saturation point. Two is people keep coming and going. So somebody leaves the blog, and I have to figure out if he should be on that list anymore.  Or somebody posts an entry or two and then requests to be on that list with no intention of maintaining a blog. If somebody misses that list bad enough to commit to maintaining it, we can have it back.

Hot discussions is being reworked. I realized it was not accomplishing the intended purpose and on top of that had potential for abuse. I want hot discussions to feature outstanding race reports or interesting discussions of vital subjects rather than nonsense banter or attempts to artificially draw attention to some issues. The plan is that we will rate those discussions by the number of posters rather than the number of posts. To avoid possible abuse login will be required to post a comment. This will also solve the problem of anonymous comments. I have removed the box for now as it reached the point of just wasting space on the page.

[Jon Allen]

Sasha- I imagine it might be hard, but I have one idea/thought on redoing the Hot Topics.  When someone leaves a comment, there could be a box that they could check that reads "This should be a Hot Topic" or something like that (i.e. interesting topic, good race report, etc).  The 5 posts with the most votes in the past week would show up on the Hot Topics list.  Maybe find a way to only give them a vote on their first post so no multiple voting would occur.  Again, that may be difficult programming-wise, but it is one potential way to meet your intention.

[Sasha Pachev]

It would not be too hard to do, but total posters count is easier. And my feeling is that either method will put to the top 7 the same entries most of the time. Each method  has an error potential - posters count will err when people leave random comments that do not necessarily mean endorsement but not much - if 30 people found a certain post comment-worthy that says something about the post. At the same time, voting method is subject to error as well with people forgetting to vote, not knowing they can vote, not knowing how to use the vote function, etc.

[Cal Stauffer]

Will the Hot Discussions have a time limit as well?  Some of those currently listed haven't had new posts in several weeks...

[Sasha Pachev]

The time limit is 60 days right now. This is high on purpose. With a low time limit it would be very easy for a senseless discussion to make it to the hot discussions list. Once it makes it, due to the fact that lack of sense is often  contagious it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy hot discussion as the comments keep being added. With the new change, no discussion will make it to the list unless it is more interesting than 7 most interesting race reports in the last two months. However, nothing is fool proof, I already am envisioning ways to bypass the original intention of the change. So to discourage that I will manually delete the comments if a dumb discussion happens to make it to that list.

[Jon Allen]

60 days?  Seems very long- I think we'll be sick of the discussion by that time.  I would vote for a shorter time period so we can see more/different posts.  But whatever.

[Cal Stauffer]

Not that this is a democracy or anything, but i vote to put it back the way it was.  You could always reserve the right to delete the discussion if it's lame or misused.

Some times a 'hot' discussion involves only a few people, but with a lot of back and forth.  Seems to me that the total posts is still a significant factor.

[Sasha Pachev]

Cal - remember that if I have to delete manually, that is a problem. My cloning capabilities are very limited, and I have only 24 hours in a day, 8 of which must be reserved for sleep. The blog makes very little money, less now that the advertising industry is not doing so well, so I cannot treat it as a job by any stretch of the imagination. It is a whole lot easier to get two people talking about nothing than to get 30 people talking about nothing. Or, for one blogger that wanted to get attention to post a multitude of meaningless comments on his own blog to put himself on the Hot Discussions.

The idea of the 2 month limit is that if a not specially promoted post did not get the attention of more bloggers than the best posts 2 months ago, it does not deserve to be on the Hot Topics. If it is truly Hot, it should have no problem beating somebody's 2 month old race report. If you really think you or somebody else wrote about something hot, post on the Discussion Board and link to the entry. If it is really as hot as you think it is, others will respond.

[Kelli]

Are only race entries eligible for the Hot Topics?  Or is that just a fluke.  I guess more people comment on races, but it would be nice to have some other entries on there.  I think some of the daily entries are very worthwhile.