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· Feb 3, 2016 1m read

What happened to the homepage?

It looks like the logged in homepage is missing some elements.  

 - Masthead image with info about Global Summit

 - Announcements -  I thought items from the announcment group would be on the home page (seems logical important announcments on the homepage?)

 There just seems to be some random posts on the home page.  What filter put them on my homepage? 

It is not newest based on the timedate stamp.

It is not based on groups or tags.

It is not based on the number of comments 

It is not based on the ratings/stars (which are not shown except after you have opened a post - this is a UI shortcoming)

what is the logic for the seeming random assortment of posts on my homepage?

Discussion (26)1
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The items there are not random. Sorted by radioactvity_value, last comment date, post date all DESC. Header took up too much space and had to go. Announcements can be set in a way that they show up in the right column as Top Stories. It's free of filtering by group or tag, you can do that elsewhere on the site. Ratings needs to be completely reworked so it's not currently factoring into the sort, nor is the number of comments. This somewhat cleaner display is making way for new filtering coming in a week or so which will have "My Content", "Most Active", "Highest Rated" and "Unanswered". Tag filering will also be revisited (eventually).

yes, we are still tweaking the sorting. Now that we have filtering it makes the radioactive value (popularity proxy) less important in the sort. So what we need to do I think is two things:

1. Change the "Most Active" filter to be some filter on high-value radioactivity postings. Maybe it is possible to do the "top 10% or something", I'll need to verify.

2. Change the sorting to only [PostDateTime], [LastCommentDateTime] DESC

Paul, could you please disable radioactive because it's confusing and useless at the moment? 

Tight now, with so small traffic and counted active members we need full, unfiltered stream of posts sorted by modification/post fate. That's it. No radioactive sorting unless you clearly explained its values to the community (I suspect there are soe, but apparently consensus here that radioactive sorting is evil).

Yes, front page shows you the "hottest" things based on https://www.drupal.org/project/radioactivity then all of the content can be seen (using the same sort criteria) by clicking the View All button at the bottom of the listing. Radioactivity is surrogate for the popularity of a posting but we need to review the rules to see if it's good enough and tracking "views" is not necessary. Tracking views is tricky since you have to do it by user (if logged in) or IP (which may not be reliable) and with the caching you have another issue.

Do you think that the number of postings on the home page is correct or should we change it? As I mentioned above new filtering is coming plus a better way to manage the content by tag.

The sidebar already has a  list of "top" posts which I assume would be based on radioactivity as well.  It also has 2 other lists.  My personal preference would be if the main bulk of the page wasn't a giant list but more of a dashboard view.  Perhaps things like "6 new posts since your last visit" or "8 comments from friends", then you could click on each to list the relevant content.

Groups and Communities are basically the same thing. We removed the Groups link since this was confusing and the UI wasn't great. We are going to be favoring tags over groups anyway. Use Communities and you'll get to the same content. Also with the new filtering on the home page there should be less hunting around for content. https://community.intersystems.com/connect/communities

On the editor we got complaints that the choice in editors was a waste of space. Next release is targeting new editor plus working to see how we get it with Markdown support.