Truemors
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We wanted to give you a heads up about a change we'll be making next week.
We think these changes will not only help the website run more efficiently, but will also be easier to use and look better.
It’s our flagging system that will be changing.
There are a few key changes:
- Instead of flagging a story as ‘good stuff’, you will now be ‘recommending’ it to other members.
- You will also now be able to recommend stories, photos, videos and comments.
- Also, anyone will be able to recommend a story, photo, video, or comment on NowPublic – you don’t have to be signed in to the site to do so.
When you do recommend a story, photo, video, or comment, which will be located next to or just underneath the item in question, the number of times that item has been recommended, will go up by 1.
When you now recommend a story, no default text of ‘I like this story, it’s good stuff’ will appear anymore and the recommendations will not be connected to the comments.
So you can recommend a story, and then if you wish to, you can scroll down to the bottom of the story to leave a comment.
The person who posted the story however, will still receive a notification that the story has been recommended by you or by an anonymous person. So don’t worry if the number of recommendations you receive do not correspond to the number of comments you have – they are now separate ways to interact with a story.
A member or an anonymous commenter may want to recommend your story but not comment and vice versa.
The rest of the flags – ‘needs improvement’, ‘fishy’, ‘spam’, ‘breaking’ and ‘news wanted’ will stay the same.
In the ranking system, the division of points will change for recommendations, but only going forward from this point. Past stories and flags will stay the same.
So it won’t be too much of a disruption but we feel this will be a better way to interact with stories and will allow stories to move quickly up in the ranks with just one easy click.
We hope that you like our changes and find them easier to work with.
All the best,
NowPublic
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (42)
- reply
meeeeeee (not verified)at 17:06 on October 31st, 2008
zzzzz, so what has changed - not much - hardly worth 300 or so words you have written
at 17:27 on October 31st, 2008
I like it. Thanks for your work NP!
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Carola Von Hoffmannstahl-Solomonoff (not verified)at 17:49 on October 31st, 2008
Sounds simpler and less confusing. And I'm glad to hear you've removed the sign in requirement. It makes input more inclusive. People who want to post comments don't necessarily want to join a site in order to do so. Good work...
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Pamela Ebling (not verified)at 19:14 on October 31st, 2008
Thanks for the heads up, amy.
Sounds like it will much more streamlined and efficient. Great job by the NP team.
much more user-friendly.
Cheers,
merrie
at 20:12 on October 31st, 2008
The changes sound good. I am glad about the decision to remove 'its good stuff' as some non-members, not used to this way of recommendation, found it offensive when a tragic story was also called 'good stuff'.
Thanks for all the other improvements too. Great job!
Regards,
Rumana Husain
at 20:17 on November 3rd, 2008
It's a good idea to edit that comment when GSing a tragic story. put something else in place and just have the gold GS check.
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Laughing-Samurai (not verified)at 23:30 on October 31st, 2008
And what about being able to mark a post down, instead of up, which is used on other sites, like Current News dot com. Should be able to mark a post we don't like?
at 12:12 on November 1st, 2008
This is an interesting idea, and some sites do use this quite effectively, however at the moment we don't have anything like this in place on NowPublic. We feel that, for now anyway, we just want to encourage positive reinforcement on stories, and if a member doesn't like a story then they can just not recommend it to others, or start a constructive discussion in the comment section.
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Laughing-Samurai (not verified)at 23:35 on October 31st, 2008
NP should also have an "Upcoming Section" were posts stay until they receive five votes and are then moved to the main section. This I believe would improve the quality of the posts reaching the front page, and reduce the chances of a post which is nothing more than a copy and paste from hitting the front page.
at 22:18 on November 2nd, 2008
Hi Laughing-Samurai, thanks for your comments.
We've actually made a little adjustment for what it takes for stories to become "recommended". It now takes more than one recommendation to get to the story to be considered for the front page (in fact we'll start with 10 recommendations required and see how that goes). If you want to see what's upcoming we've got a list of stories in each "Headlines" section (including the Front Page) sorted by "Most Recommended" where you can see what's almost made it to the top five. Just a note: for recommending comments and NowPublic Scan posts it will still only take one recommendation to get the comment or post onto the "recommended" list.
at 03:53 on November 3rd, 2008
What happens during "quieter" periods when it's currently not unknown for posts with no comments and no flags (or as will be recommendations) to make the Front Page? Will other stories hang around for longer than the scheduled eight hours until users/contributors come on line and begin leaving comments or recommending other posts?
at 11:20 on November 4th, 2008
Stories will still be on the front page for 8 hours at a time and then will be replaced by the next ones in line with recommendations. When a story has no recommendations but still makes the front page, then that means it has a lot of page views; something that's not uncommon during the off-peak hours in the Vancouver office.
at 23:55 on October 31st, 2008
Sounds good, wait till next week to see how it works.
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paschen2 (not verified)at 23:55 on October 31st, 2008
NP needs to deal out the members who are get away with making insulting personal comments, then I may come back
at 01:52 on November 1st, 2008
good day,
My mind is just like that of miss. Solomon - it is now easier and better. The no need to sign-in is great.
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Cassiano Travareli (not verified)at 03:12 on November 1st, 2008
The changes sound good. Thanks for your work NP!
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Tom Pick (not verified)at 04:29 on November 1st, 2008
What about a press release or an article about a product or company? On the one hand, its in the best interest of NowPublic and your readers to keep the site free of spam (to the extent that's possible), but on the other hand -- not all business-related content is spam.
Just wondering. It would be nice to be able flag something about a company or product one likes without incurring the wrath of the NowPublic community.
at 12:16 on November 1st, 2008
We don't allow press releases or articles about products or companies on NowPublic because we do have a strict spam policy that we try to enforce as much as possible. We feel that if we do start to allow these posts, it would just turn NowPublic into more of an advertising board than a news site. However, we do deal with posts on a case by case basis, so it's difficult to answer these questions completely at the moment.
at 09:47 on November 1st, 2008
I see a new NP addition--this message on some comments: "Your comment is being held." Is that holding used only for some posters, or what? Interesting change.
at 12:28 on November 1st, 2008
I just tested this and can't get the system to hold a comment of mine - this is very strange. We haven't implemented this process at all. We will test it further. Thanks for letting us know.
at 22:09 on November 2nd, 2008
Hi PEP, the comment you received was in fact part of our spam protection, now that we have opened commenting up to anonymous users we've had to put extra safeguards in place. Rest assured it's not targeted at any particular members ;). It may occur (among other reasons) if a hyperlink has been included in the post or if several comments have been posted within a certain period of time.
at 05:04 on November 3rd, 2008
Thanks for the reply, mbaumgartner. FYI, there was no HTML or link in the reply. The only other activity I'd had was to give a GS flag a few minutes earlier. I wasn't adding an "anonymous" comment, but was logged in.
Also, once that message appears, the entire comment appears to be gone, lost. So anyone who gets that message will, based on my experience, lose whatever comment they have created.
at 10:05 on November 1st, 2008
I like the new changes.
at 11:52 on November 1st, 2008
Thanks for letting us know, Amy.
at 12:29 on November 1st, 2008
Thanks everyone for your comments and feedback.
at 15:52 on November 2nd, 2008
I like these changes. Much improvement! Thanks NP.
at 04:03 on November 3rd, 2008
Does this mean that in theory the Front Page could be composed of a story, a video, a photo and a comment all from the same post as long as they've been recommended often enough?
Or could the Front Page (again in theory) consist of just the top five recommended comments with no story attached?
Or when recommending something are you recommending the whole package and not each element separately?
Sorry, I'm not being intentionally thick here. It comes naturally.
at 11:16 on November 4th, 2008
These are good questions - I will however let Marc answer these tomorrow as he knows more about it than I do.
at 13:08 on November 4th, 2008
The top-5 block is made up of most-recommended/viewed stories, so a photo/video alone cannot live in this space. However, allowing active ranking of media elements gives us room to play in terms of "greatest hits" or top-ranked photos or videos. The more functionality we give ourselves, the more options we'll have in the future, both in terms of development and user interaction.
at 13:12 on November 4th, 2008
Oh, thank you Jordan!