What happened to the 'Most Read/Commented' list of articles on the front page?
What happened to the 'Most Read/Commented' list of articles on the front page?
It was my main means of navigation and now its gone.
This topic was created by quitequick .
... but no, the powers that be have actually killed it. I'll file this change alongside the all the other UI freakery of late, like Metro/Modern/Notro (whatever the $%^&* it's called this week).
Ho Hum. Is there a special "retro" section where us luddites can go to get the "Most Commented" whilst we are moaning about the rise of mechanical weaving looms?
We want to showcase articles with longer shelf life than breaking news stories. Hence Spotlight.
Most Read is not a great indicator of organic traffic, at times - it may simply be showing a Reddit raid., or a Stumbleupon surge.
Although the traffic is not significant for most comments. We are interested in showing people where the conversations are taking place. Currently, most comments algorithm is flawed - and needs to be given some loving. We'll try to figure out how to best do this.
Suggestion: Drop incoming non-organic traffic IP addresses on the floor as useless. Don't even bother ACKing them. Pretend you don't exist when it comes to their address space.
Works for me ... Spam by any other name is still spam.
My comment @06:08 got me about 50 "thumbs down" in under an hour. Around midnight on Friday evening (West Coast time, 8AM Zulu).
I don't believe that there were that many induhvidual folks who actually read my commentardary, much less bothered to stick their thumbs updown in that time-frame.
I can't be arsed to figure out which part of my back-log it is down-voting this time ... bottom line is that "thumbs" are completely useless. So is commentardary, but once in a while I learn something from a commentard. I have never learned a single thing from "thumbs".
Shame. Most read/commented gave a clear indication (so long as the code works properly) of where the interest in the reg community is. 'Spotlight' appears to give a clear indication of where the reg's interest is.
The BBC news website manages to maintain a 'Most Popular' set of links. Can't be rocket science, can it?
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... Title says it all really, the comments are what makes the site, and it didnt take that much space.
Whos bright idea was this neways, i sense to many fizzy pops while drawing up this idea, obviously dosnt use the site from a readers perspective.
The reg's unique selling point has been buried.
We have restored both for now - BUT - I am not sure for how long.
Most read / most commented do not produce much traffic - and it is questionable if most read produces any new traffic.
BTW The bottom of the front page has a link called Most Read - showing the 20 most popular stories in the last 24 hours.
OK, that is an unusual combination - a tiny fraction of one per cent of our readership. So I am not going to OK a bug hunt, sorry.
But I see you have an old version of FF there. Any chance of updating and see if that makes a difference?
Update: On second thoughts - it is now at bottom of front page for me too, so don't go changing on our account! We'll see how we get on here for a few weeks before we go changing anything.
Glad to see most read/commented is back.
But it seems to be reset once a week on a Monday morning, if I'm not mistaken. By the end of Monday/Tuesday, the list is pretty much set for the rest of the week. I can imagine there is therefore an argument to say that most read/commented is perhaps driving readers to those articles preferentially, even if more noteworthy articles are subsequently published during the week. I presume this is something El Reg would not ideally want.
So why not reset it once a day? Would be better for us (me) and for you (El Reg).