Weblog entry #172 for Steve
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I'm sorry to announce that the website tips, as featured on the front-page will be removed in the next day.
At the time they seemed like a simple way to increase participation. Specifically the intention was to allow user-generated content to appear upon the front-page even if it wasn't long, "advanced", or approved. (This would allow me to reply to submission which were very very basic with "post it as a tip - no need for approval).
However this didn't work out, for three main reasons:
- Either the tips weren't obvious enough, or nobody wanted to write any.
- Tips contained errors yet
- The author couldn't update them.
- Comments couldn't be posted upon them.
The latter two problems could have been fixed by my writing more code, however I didn't feel that this was a great use of my time. Especially when I've been too busy to work upon this site for a while.
A recent mail from Jameson Rollins, coupled with comments from Daniel Kahn Gillmor crystalised these thoughts and suggested a new direction.
Prior to the introduction of tips I usually mailed authors and suggested they post their intended submissions as weblog entries - because the readers of this site are very generous with the comments and feedback and this was another means of "publishing" which didn't require moderator-approval.
(As an aside I don't have the intention or desire to censor blog postings; if you want to write about your children, your pets, or utterly non-Debian things then I'd be fine with that. If they get too sweary they'll be hidden from the front-page but thats as far as I intend to go. I hope that things continue as they have - people do tend to post Debian-specific, or at least Linux-specific items here, which both suprises and pleases me.)
So what is the new solution?
Well rather than reimplement the same thing twice. Something that can be edited by the owner, can be commented upon, and something that can be tagged I'm recycling weblog entries themselves!
If you, or somebody else upon the site, tags an entry with the magical word "tip" it will be featured upon the front-page in a tip-specific region.
This will even have an RSS feed (once items are posted to it!)
As always comments are welcome. I'm aware this is a long entry and there could be more comments pro and con, but I've been on a train for 5 hours today and it is 23:59. So I'd rather sleep ..
Comments on this Entry
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Thanks. The change should be live now.
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Tips? What are tips?
They were never advertised, there is not an index page for them, they only show up in the front page in the bottom right part of the page (not easy to spot, if you ask me).
If you compare tips with weblog entries (which are constantly displayed on the left pane, not only in the front page), no wonder they are not so popular!
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Very few things are ever explicitly advertised - tips received as much advertising as anything else ever did upon this page. There was a brief mention in the site News and I mentioned them here in my weblog a few times.
As for their location I agree that is not optimal, however space is tight and crowding the left-side even further wouldn't help much more.
One of many problems with the current layout/design of the site - the problem is I can'd do much better alone and few people volunteer to make improvements, or constructive suggestions for changes.
I did think that the idea of the tips was a good one, the main problem is that few people, such as yourself, noticed them and even fewer people posted things there. I guess I should get used to that, but I'm an optimist!
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As an aside, why not set
linebreaks to 1 in the BBCode parsing module (line 140)? That way when using BBCode one could stop having to write <br/> any time a line break is needed.--------
Felipe Sateler
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I could imagine having a seperate section, but I'm guessing that turnover wouldn't be sufficient to make them useful to display upon every page.
If things change, or it looks like they aren't visible enough then I'm happy to re-think this.
As for your BBCode suggestion; I've made the change now. (I don't use BBCode so I didn't ever notice it wasn't working in a natural manner.)
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No, the real problem is that users rarely submit articles.
The idea of allowing "shorter" pieces was designed to potentially increase the number of submissions. Unfortunately it didn't change things significantly.
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> I'd love to see them, but I rarely visit the front page (I use the RSS feeds)
Why not just add tips channel mentioned by Steve into your RSS reader then?
--
...Bye..Dmitry.
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