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 Administrative / General / 12623
12622  |  12624
Subject: 
Re: Compromised Functionality on Lugnet and Brickshelf?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general
Date: 
Sat, 16 Apr 2005 14:04:01 GMT
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In lugnet.admin.general, Larry Pieniazek wrote:
   In lugnet.admin.general, Marc Nelson Jr. wrote:
   The whole weights system looks like an attempt to control what gets discussed on LUGNET, and that is my problem with it. If that is not the intent, why not just implement the skip-filter on the spotlight?

That takes a code change. And not necessarily an easy one either. Worse, it may have a serious impact on overall performance, not sure, since the currrent spotlight list is calculated globally once every few minutes instead of specifically (with respect to a particular person’s filter) every time a page is viewed.

As a software developer, I don’t think this would be all *that* bad, at least performance wise. First, you’d calculate a ranking of postings which would be similar to how you create the spotlight list today. Call this new (internal list) the “ranked posting list”. This is what you’d compute once every few minutes.

Then, when an indivual logs in, you could apply *their* skip filter and optionally their own personal weightings (see my suggestion here http://news.lugnet.com/admin/general/?n=12622). So, you wouldn’t really be calculating entire spotlight list for every user, you’d just be applying a bit of added filtering for each user.

I’ve implemented some very performance critical code in this way and it works well. It works because the expensive part of the calculation is determining the initial rankings (the “ranked posting list”). To make the post-filtering easier, in your “ranked posting list”, you’d keep metadata with each entry to allow you to apply whatever individual user filtering you desire. Because you’ve kept around the metadata to do the filtering, the filtering step goes very fast.

Make sense?

I’m sure this would require code changes, but such a scheme shouldn’t be that hard or time consuming to implement.

Tailoring Lugnet to an indivual’s tastes would help stop people from leaving Lugnet for smaller sites. Why? Because it’s the awful signal to noise ratio that makes Lugnet feel far too big (it takes too long to find what you really want, especially when you look at what’s spotlighted and don’t see anything that interests you). Applying user based filtering to the spotlight list would greatly improve the signal to noise ratio and make Lugnet feel much smaller than it really is.

Unfortunately you can’t make Lugnet feel smaller when all of the filtering is done by admins.

Jeff



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Compromised Functionality on Lugnet and Brickshelf?
 
(...) Um, I encourage people to spotlight posts every chance I get... (...) Adjusting spotlight weights isn't changing the whole scheme, though, is it? Spotlight weights have been around for a very long time and they get periodically adjusted. (...) (...) (19 years ago, 13-Apr-05, to lugnet.admin.general, FTX)

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