Thanks for the feedback. The popular articles are remaining on the home page but when you choose View All at the bottom you can see everything page by page. The next release will have filtering that allows you to quickly see what's new.
Top Posts is something different - you can put a posting in a queue to appear in these "top listings" and stay there until you remove them. Good feedback on the other ideas, maybe that is possible but we need to address some other things before we circle back on the home page.
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 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).
Content rating is going to get completely reworked, most likely to the +1/-1 system. Any change to the current rating scheme was unintentional. We'll be doing releases each week for the next few weeks and rating changes will likely be in the release two weeks from now. Next two releases will focus on the following:
- more UI layout and usability enhancements
- improvements to authoring / editing
- new content types (articles vs. generic postings)
- internal tools for porting content from other systems
- new content filtering options
thank you for the feedback. We will look at this.
The current feed is an experiment - not planning to promote it yet until we get to the first UI refresh which changes some of the underlying blocks the RSS feed depends on plus the filtering by topic needs to be worked out. Go ahead and use it now if you want but I don't want too much dependency on it if it's going to change.
Entered as bug - [DC-142] Localize all date formats
Thank you for your feedback. Yes, this will all change in the UI refresh coming soon.
We're investigating what support exists now with the existing site and full support for RSS is planned if it's not already there.
Stack Overflow synchronization is part of our plan for 2016. We would prefer to have better control over the content than is possible with Stack Overflow thus the push for Developer Community. We know the UI needs improvement and features are missing but there is a commitment to get it done.
We are going to revamp the gamification but this is a lower priority than other initiatives. We may end up removing it until it's fully baked.
Missing feature apparently. Putting it on the backlog. In the mean time we'll change it for you.
Thanks for the feedback on this. There will be a refresh of the UI within 2 weeks and then additional updates after that to enhance the usability.
In the short term the UI for these two things will normalized. In the longer term the functionality will be combined and there will be no need to have these two things.
I haven't seen this either. Please let us know if this is still happening.
Tagging will be improved in a number of ways including driving ALL of the content using it and away from the "discussion group" style of display. Getting this all functional so that documentation is also granular enough and tagged in an efficient manner will take some time.
Not so sure about the crowd-sourcing method and/or being smart about suggesting tags. We need to build up a body of content and participation to get that functioning well, so it may be more suitable in the long term once we get some network effect going. It would be interesting to apply some AI to make tag suggestions.
We will at least have a "browse by tag" functionality but it's uncertain if this will just be a simple list vs. the "cloud" style of display.
Yes, the Exchange Server can act as a standard SMTP relay. The machines allowed to use it as a relay can be controlled on the server. From the machine that will be sending the emails, Telnet to the Exchange Server port 25 and you should get an initial response per the SMTP RFC.