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Tim,
It was the LIFO thing that I was talking about. But I guess there are limitations on what can and can't be done.
The current system is working well on speed and useability but it is always nice to speculate on what direction things could go.
JM
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Let me throw in a few things here:
You can't merely go by the total number of posts on a thread to see how active it is, but rather by how many posts have been done recently (rather obvious, I suppose).
New threads should be given a high priority because they're new, not only based on the number of posts recently added to them.
A high-voted thread should be given a higher priority, and maybe also a low-voted thread should get a lower priority
You might want to cache priority levels and only update them when a vote is cast, a post is added, or a given time interval (5 hrs, 1 day, or something) has passed, etc. Saves load on the server (priority levels are just another number field that way), and doesn't affect the results at all.
I'd also like to allow for voting a thread as a "sticky" thread - one that goes in an all-time favorites section - maybe when someone bookmarks a thread in their thread bookmarks, that thread's priority in the global all-time favorites list is incremented. A thread would have to get a certain number of bookmarks to be even shown on the favorites list. (Hmm... should that apply to whole threads or just individual posts?)
Tim Deveaux wrote:
But hey - it sure is nice of us to brainstorm these new specs for Chris
 You can tell I'm in "design mode" here! 
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jdunlap wrote:
You can tell I'm in "design mode" here!
I tell ya, the guy has it good!
Bookmarking threads (can we do that? - as a CP feature, I mean? I haven't played with that) would certainly have an impact on a LIFO thread forum view, assuming a discussion had grabbed the attenion of a couple users.
Hmmmm...
Ain't feature creep fun? 
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This is why the idea of bookmarking a thread, or perhaps a "hall of fame" of sorts is so appealing - there are plenty of threads that are [interesting|informative|entertaining] which are occasionally useful to refer back to, but have no business being posted to.
Though, CP's forum search has improved somewhat, so this is less crucial than it once seemed.
Shog9
---
You'd better turn back, before the frost sets in.
These desert nights are for weathered men,
The ones who've already given in...
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Granted - this might be mostly a lounge thing - although I wish there was a way to get some programming threads into the FAQ on occasion.
Example? Well, in a couple of weeks we'll have the annual 'Meaning of Christmas' thread(s) (which I hope are not purely soapbox material) and they will probably surface a few times. Kind of disheartening for those who stay up till two crafting the difinitive post on the origins of the Yule Bunny to see the question rise again in MOC thread 3.2.
Also, might be nice to log in in the morning and see if there were any highlites from the night before... I mean, without having to wake up too quiclkly... 
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I guess what we're really talking about is enabling value-added users. Let's talk clicks and mortar ROI - what can we do to empower inter-holistics vv thread incubation?
Bookmarks. No. As an asset tracking mindshare, its leverage to incentive implementation graph wouldn't cascade - would require another server to boot.
Chris Maunder wrote:
Hmm. Maybe what I can do is show the top N threads from the last M weeks ranked by the sum of the votes for messages in those threads.
Maunder, you've got your goats in a row here. Keep it simple and go production asap. Once we start gaining traction on the customer-facing aspects we can get granular on the back end. I don't want to whiteboard this past the vortal of opportunity. We can start convergence towards enabling sticky threads once we disintermediate the initial bandwidth.
And thanks again. I know you'll architect another world-class solution.
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I think there are some synergies here that are exciting to all parties. I've made some action items that will incentivise the team and optimise the global potential. We need to fasttrack this by channelling scalable mindsets.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Great! Sounds like you're leveraged to enable a client involving strategic productization. Look forward to engaging this on the next level.
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I frequently find myself pointing users with questions in the forums at various articles that I've either bookmarked or written. I think it'd be nice to have yet another button that brings up a window containing the collection of bookmarked articles and articles the author has written. When clicked, it inserts a link (with the option to open it in a new window like the link[^] button) at the current insertion point in the reply textbox. This would certainly make this process easier.
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.21
GCS/G/MU d- s: a- C++++ UL@ P++(+++) L+(--) E--- W+++ N++ o+ K? w++++ O- M(+) V? PS-- PE Y++ PGP++ t++@ 5 X+++ R+@ tv+ b(-)>b++ DI++++ D+ G e++>+++ h---* r+++ y+++
-----END GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
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What's with the unedited articles? Are you going for the CodeGuru effect? 
I thought it was a temporary measure to relieve the load and that someone would get around to editing them properly some day. Now they're just taking over like weeds in an untended garden.
Some areas have a huge list of unedited articles (larger than the edited and categorized ones) which are a mish mash of all sorts of things that take forever to pore over if your looking for anything in particular (and many of them are quite bad and probably would have not been accepted if they went through *any* kind of review process).
Articles are really the core of why people come to this site, it's starting to look like the essential nature of this site is being neglected in favor of ever cooler forums etc.
Is CodeProject "jumping the shark"?
I suggest that the unedited articles get "edited" and properly categorized and that no more new ones are added without going through a review process. It's exactly that process that separates CP from the billion and one other source code sites out there. (or at least it's what *used* to separate CP from them, it's getting harder to tell now).
And for pity's sake: Add a true beginner section and ask people to write some articles for it. It's been asked for long enough. I want a place to send people who have nothing more than an internet connection, a windows pc and a willingness to learn how to program.
It could be a real coup for CodeProject as there is nothing like it out there now. A step by step guide to getting the .net framework for example, installing that free c# IDE, on to their first "hello world", "What is an object?" etc etc. Enough to bring an absolute beginner up to where they could benefit from all the other articles.
People love to write articles when they know it's within their level of competence and CP could be the premier site for learning to program.
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John Cardinal wrote:
And for pity's sake: Add a true beginner section and ask people to write some articles for it.
I'm thinking I'll write som myself, when I get some time. i have a brother who's learning programming, and would benefit from beginner's articles, so I have someone to test them before submitting them.
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Hello John
Smitha and I, specially Smitha, and a bunch of volunteer editors have been working on the unedited backlog for the past few months. In fact, while I do not have exact figures, together we must have been editing and moving around 350-400 unedited articles each month. The reasons there still is a huge number of unedited articles are that, there was a really large number of them when we started this large-scale moving process and also, nearly every day people contribute more articles.
Some of the articles are left in the unedited section, because the authors have requested that they be left there. But the other articles are being worked on regularly. We try to choose articles that are well written, have interesting content or cover topics not covered by other articles. At times we also consider ratings (choosing higher rated ones over lower rated ones) as a criteria in deciding whether an article should be given priority over another.
Editing and moving an article is not a 5 minute job. We have to go through the entire article, verify that basic grammar is maintained, fix all typos and spelling errors, reformat the HTML completely, resize pictures as and when needed, sometimes fix broken links, external links, verify downloads, remove temp files from downloads etc. So the unedited backlog won't disappear in a day or even a week. In fact things are made harder for Smitha and me, by the fact that we are in a really 3rd world city with no affordable stable-bandwidth options. But we are doing our best and eventually we hope to reach a stage of equilibrium where the unedited article list is kept to a minimum number so that new articles can be quickly edited and moved (unless the authors want it otherwise).
I am not sure if my post has made sense to you, but I just wanted to let you know that, the lapses - if any, are not due to lack of effort.
Regards
Nish
Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework [NW] (coming soon...)
Summer Love and Some more Cricket [NW] (My first novel)
Shog's review of SLASMC [NW]
This post was made from Trivandrum city, India on a 0.0001 KB/s net connection
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So maybe CP needs more editors?
Regards,
Rohit Sinha
Browsy
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa
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Hi Nish, sounds like a lot of work but on the right track. I realize it's time consuming and painful to do, but if it was my site that's exactly what I'd be doing.
It's a bit of a mystery to me why there are still new unedited articles allowed and also why some authors are requested they remain unedited?
Surely that's something you guys should be putting your foot down on? (Isn't that a bit like trying to bail water out of a boat while keeping a hole in the bottom?)
Sorry for your bandwidth woes.
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John Cardinal wrote:
why some authors are requested they remain unedited
So that they can keep updating the article as often as they wish without having to go through the editing process. Once an article is edited, you need to ask the editor to make any change. You can update an unedited article on your own though (if you are the author).
Regards,
Rohit Sinha
Browsy
Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.
- Mother Teresa
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Indeed - the difference has been quite noticeable since Smitha joined the team! 
Nishant S wrote:
This post was made from Trivandrum city, India on a 0.0001 KB/s net connection
Look at the world about you and trust to your own convictions. - Ansel Adams
Meg's World - Blog
Photography - The product of my passion
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Part of CPs uniqueness is that articles are published without an intermediary editor approval process.
You hit submit and there in front of 700k devs is your article, live from New York to Hong Kong, from Sydney to London, from Cape Town to Nova Scotia.
It is a pretty incredible concept, one that does require some give and take by us viewers.
Introduce a mandatory editor step and it becomes just another article website.
If you start reading an unedited article, realise it is a crap article and get annoyed, then best you stick to the edited sections. I don't mind going through the unedited because for every 5 bad ones there is 1 great article.
my 2 cents.
As for the beginners section, what do you propose? I would be keen to help out but it is a big task and needs to be done properly, with some planning. I would think a far reaching contents list would need to be drawn up and an article or two done each month, each one tackling a certain topic.
regards,
Paul Watson
Bluegrass
South Africa
Brian Welsch wrote:
"blah blah blah, maybe a potato?" while translating my Afrikaans.
Crikey! ain't life grand?
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Ouch! Well I wouldn't post suggestions if I didn't care, apathy is a far graver problem than a "bad" suggestion. 
Actually, I half agree with you and half don't. My real concern with the unedited articles is they are all automatically placed in the "Unedited" articles section.
A compromise would be to somehow identify them as unedited, but still get them categorized with more granularity.
That's my real point I guess, right now it's a needle in a haystack situation.
Beginners section:
Here is where this came from, I have a friend that want's to learn to program, he has an internet connection and no money. I tried to find a site to point him to that would give him the beginning steps of explaining what programming is about, steps to acquire free tools from the internet to get started: .Net framework, the free IDE (SharpDevelop I think it's called), etc. Enough to get all the tools required. Then a series of "hello world", what is an object, language rules and syntax, where to find more language details (msdn) etc.
Enough to bring a person up to where they can get going on their own with the help of the existing articles on CP when they want to do something specific.
What would be required is some collaboration of suggestions by people on what the outline would be, then break it into segments for separate articles.
The key being small simple things that get some interesting results while teaching a concept.
I support two teams: the Canucks and whoever is playing the Leafs!
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I suggested we have a competition whereby a list of articles are proposed and members then compete to fill out those articles. If we can do that then I have prizes to giveaway. The trick is to work out a method whereby we can have a list and somehow generate the best articles possible without frustrating authors. Maybe two people submit the same article, or maybe an article is written and it's poor quality so another author replaces the article. Angst all round.
I want to do this, so lets think of a way.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
I suggested we have a competition whereby a list of articles are proposed and members then compete to fill out those articles.
Excellent idea! Lot's more people would probably write articles if a goal was set before them.
Chris Maunder wrote:
Maybe two people submit the same article, or maybe an article is written and it's poor quality so another author replaces the article
I'm not exactly an "expert" programmer but I have no problem with people giving constructive criticism so if the first effort isn't ideal it can be improved with help from others. That should be something emphasized in all this as most people are probably afraid to post an article because they don't feel confident enough in their skills when it's going to be seen by so many people.
Chris Maunder wrote:
The trick is to work out a method whereby we can have a list and somehow generate the best articles possible without frustrating authors
Well it seems to me that people can just take on an article, publish it and then everyone gets a chance to review it and make suggestions. Or if more than one person wants to do an article they can co-author it?
Better to do a bit of planning and try something to see what happens and improve it the next time around than to burn cycles trying to account for every possible problem.
Kind of like how we write software: when we have a large new project coming up we do a small subset of it that covers all the new features as a test then we do the real thing.
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John Cardinal wrote:
.Net framework, the free IDE (SharpDevelop I think it's called), etc.
How's this[^] for the first tutorial? (Currently a Word doc, but I'll upload it to CodeProject as soon as I can if you like it.) Is the length right, or should I cover more per tutorial?
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Yes, but perhaps a step before that on what the .net framework is and how to install it.
Then in this one, strictly how to install SharpDevelop would be best then separate articles on "your first program" etc.
Part of a "chain" of articles maybe (Part 1, part 2) so people know what order to take them in?
Some of the stuff you mentioned by be a bit confusing though like mentioning "base classes" near the start etc. I guess if you described what it was about without using the terminology yet that might be better?
Any terminology up front usually will confuse half the people and have the other half thinking they are supposed to know it to proceed. Maybe say "base classes (it's not important to know this term yet it will be covered later).."
I support two teams: the Canucks and whoever is playing the Leafs!
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But So many people have asked for it that Chris had better do it. 
