how the forums are displayed on the main page
lately i've been having some problems with the site. for some reason, where the babble section used to be displayed, it's now a videos section. so i tried accessing babble from the header at the top of the page and it brings me to a page where each subject is listed separately as opposed to the old way which had the posts in order of most recent.
first, this makes looking at the posts near impossible as you have to go back and forth to the different subjects (of which there are far too many!) whereas before you would see all the most recent postings regardless of subject which made way more sense and was so much easier to browse through to find the topics i was interested in, not to mention to see which had been recently commented on.
also, when posting content, where you select the subject (first stop, current events, walking the walk) the sub category doesn't appear anymore so it's next to impossible to really categorize the posting.
why was the previous method changed when it worked fine and replaced by one that is much more confusing, harder to browse, and harder to post?? is this something of a malfunction or software problem or has it actually been changed?
i wasn't aware of any consultation with the users on changing the format and to be honest, the new incarnation is pretty much unusable when compared to how it was previously.
does anyone else have the same problem or know what's going on here??
thanks,
milo204
i just realized i can still access the old way by going to "active topics" way down at the bottom of the page. wondering if this wont be confusing to others, especially people not familiar with the site!
it was nicer when the forums are nicely displayed on the main page and easily accessible when you arrive at the site!
thanks catchfire, bookmarking done!
Increased traffic? Are more people coming to rabble or do you mean more people are posting to babble?
Both, 2dawall. On May 1, the day before the election, rabble.ca got 17 500 unique visitors, our most ever. For the month of April, we had 250 000 unique visitors, over 60 000 more than the previous record, which was set the month before! Things are hot up in lefty media.
Too bad there's no way for babble to get a bit of income - say one penny - for every visit from everyone, with a maximum levy of, say, ten cents a day. That would go a ways towards maintaining and expanding the site, no?
Uh what about people who do not have a credit card or who use a public computer to access rabble.ca? They would not be able to pay even one penny. Maybe rabble.ca should brag about getting more visitors and then get more advertisers to come here. Given the divisiveness on the vegan/anti-vegan themes, rabble.ca could get both vegan restaurants and the Canadian Beef Information Centre to advertise here.
Do we have an idea what has brought more people here? Are they still coming here now that the election is over?
I'd like to know why the babble TAT box hasn't returned to rabble's front page.
Is the TAT box separate from what was discussed initially above?
Could anyone involved with rabble answer these questions?
2dawall: The election surge in visitors continued immediately post election, but I haven't heard the stats for this month yet, so I suppose we'll see. As for the first question, we can only speculate--but I imagine it had to do with the terrible and unsatisfying job the MSM was doing covering the election.
@Maysie: It looks like an automatically updated babble TAT box is no longer an option, since its drain on site resources is too strong. A weekly (or so) box curated by Rebecca and I is on the way, I'm told.
Was the babble TAT box always a drain on site resources? I'm not even sure what that means, by the way.
One of the reasons that it was created was to bring more of babble to other parts of rabble. Now it's gone and there's more work for the underpaid moderators? Not cool.
The coding that mined babble for new page updates was slowing down the site as a whole--if you remember the horrible, eye-gouging lag we experienced during peak election periods, you'll know what I mean. The tech folk figured out that by removing the TAT window, it removed this problem. Curating a weekly box is a less than optimum but workable solution. Obviously, both Rebecca and I, as well as the rest of the rabble staff, are invested in bringing traffic to babble--but we have to make do with the solutions available to us.
One could read this decision as Rabble being ashamed of Babble.
But its really just a technical issue; would there really be any other indication that something else is afoot?
Well, it seems that rabble finds babble a bit uncouth or impolite at times. Threads that used to appear on the main page have been censored for poopy-talk a couple of times now. So, maybe it's just not worth fixing, to them.
We have to obey the policies as they were stated. That is part of the agreement when we registered. I may not agree with all decisions but implicit in registering is that we accept the conditions. Given how often the mods themselves participate its unlikely they want babble squelched.
That's simply untrue. The technical issues are very real, and we're addressing the need for babble presence on the main page. Rabble takes babble very seriously, and respects what it has to offer to the site.
Snert's first two sentences are true. I presume you are disagreeing with his conclusion in the third senetnce.
Does rabble have the ability to determine if those new visitors who came to rabble did so from a search or from a specific link from another webpage? Do we know if anybody actually handed out those special election leaflets and if that drew anybody here?
I ask the questions as to my mind we most certainly want to replicate whatever actually drew more people here.
Are these questions read as too direct or rude or something somehow negative? I am really just trying to determine what is what so that a method of repeating the growth spurt can be repeated.
Anybody who can answer these questions?
I can explain this (speaking as a Drupal developer with no connection to Rabble):
To generate that list, the list of most recent active posts, all the posts are being looked at, and compared (last updated time on the post or last updated time of most recently updated comment), and then the 50 most recent posts are displayed. There are tricks that can be done to make this faster--like, rather than looking at ALL the posts to find the 50 most recent, instead the process could look at the 50 most recent posts updated in the last week. Clearly this is going to be a much smaller list to compare. All posts would still need to be looked at, but the operation to see if a post was updated in the last week is a much faster operation than having that post in the list to sort.
There should be no reason that the block would take longer to generate than the page. But, it is still an expensive (in terms of server processing time) operation. To process that operation every time someone looks at the TAT page, well, that's probably 0-2% of rabble hits, so the effect on the server is minimal. But, to process that operation on every single page, well then all of a sudden every page is going to load 3-5% longer, and 3-5% of Rabble's total server processing is going to be for that block. When traffic spikes, it's then a bigger spike.
I don't see any reason why this block couldn't be cached for anonymous users though--and I imagine anonymous users make up a large part of Rabble's total traffic. The block could be set to regenerate once every hour. That means that the hit to the server would happen once every hour for all the anonymous users. It would continue to regenerate fresh for logged in users on every page hit though.
I suspect there might be some broken telephone somewhere...probably the traffic spiked, there was a panic, they removed that block, things went back to normal, crisis averted. And then the Babble autogenerated TAT block got viewed as a BAD idea, and that was that.
It would be pretty trivial for babble techs to create a Babble TAT block that is cached for anonymous users and ONLY displays for anonymous users. Such a thing would be negligible in terms of resources. If such a block were only to display for logged in users on a specific Rabble page--maybe the front page, but not on any other page, then this probably wouldn't slow things down too much.
My guess is that Rabble mgt would love to promote Babble in some kind of a block like this (and it sounds it is coming, but manually curated)--but that there is some confusion about the technical details involved in making a workable auto list.
I am not holding my breath but could I get answers to these questions yet?
Hey 2dawall, sorry for the delay--I don't know why I kept missing this. We do have access to this information--or, rather, the publisher does, and she shares this with our development and promotions staff, and occasionally us. babble's Active Topics page and Canadian Politics forum remain two of the highest direct page hits on the site. We don't know how "new" visitors get here, because there's no way to tell through our stats. We do, however, learn this from our surveys--but that data is limited to whoever fills them out, obviously.
Ok thanks. Some commericial sites can trace how visitors 'land' to their site. I would be curious to know what if anything in particular brought more people here (in order to see that replicated) and if there are still more people here now than a year ago.
To clarify, we can find out how users land on our site, but we can't tell if they are new or not. Currently, our traffic is down from last summer, but last summer was a very busy one politically (G8, etc.)
Now that summer, at least the summer break, is now over, is more traffic returning to rabble?
Still pretty quiet from my end of things, but we have a slew of provincial elections coming, not to mention the NDP leadership race, so I expect it will be business as usual in the coming weeks.