Posted on 03/26/2014 10:53:56 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
The search engine gives unpredictable results, but we also have "Latest Topics" which list from newest to oldest and has "Next page" at the bottom of each page; there are keywords and topics; and as a last resort there is Google and Bing.
Blame shibumi and that will make everything clear. I promise.
Shibumi... shattered... shibumi... shattered...
It’s hard for that to happen, because there’s no priority for busy topics, or (live-edited) active headlines perhaps a la Drudge.
I always search before posting, it never works.
Ideally, the posting code would just require us to put in the URL:
- The system could then check immediately to see if it’s from a permissible source.
- The system would also “freeze” that URL for, say, ten minutes, so no one else would be able to post it.
- After ten mimutes, it would cancel yours, freeing it for someone else.
- After it got posted, anyone entering that URL would instead be served up the existing topic.
- Also, the system would reject any “root” URLs, which is sometimes a problem — a lot of these news sites have a floating set of headlines that vanish, and (ahem) some people who post these things, uh, don’t notice that. The system would beep or whatever and state “use a Permalink”. Anyone not knowing what that is probably shouldn’t be posting anyway.
- The system could then pull out the target page Meta tags, find headlines, authors, and even their default keywords.
- The first message or user comment would be prompted for at the same time as the URL, or at the next screen if the URL was accepted.
- another nice feature might be “thumbnailing” — listing out the graphics available at the story, BUT ONLY if the source doesn’t explicitly ban graphics use. That would save time for the mods as well (all this would).
- sources like Wordpress and other blogger sites would get assigned to the blogger forum (this would be phase 1, as long as I’m just dreaming up a storm), editorials would automatically go to Op-Ed, sports sites would be put in Chat etc. The user doing the posting wouldn’t be able to select that any longer.
- the article body would then either be auto-excerpted, or be listed as “link only, no excerpting” (depending on the source).
- while the system would fish out keywords from the source, it might still be nice to be able to add an optional keyword (or four, as is the case now).
Phase two, the topics, keywords, and forums would be merged, with some difficulties sorted out: e.g., there’s the Republic of Georgia, and the US state of Georgia; there’s the medieval reavers the Vikings, and the NFL team; there’s the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the former governor of NY.
- Also, in the GOP forum, there’s a Topic name for each of the 50 states, and in the News forum there’s a separate Topic name for each one, AND there are keywords (both full names, and at least two different abbreviations, plus misspellings, as well as accidental scrambling e.g. Michigan instead of Mississippi, Alaska instead of Arkansas, etc). In new topics those would be assigned based on Meta tags at the source, or if need be by the .xx national origin in the root URL.
- the “/Focus/f-” would be dropped from the URLs (legacy URLs would still be parsed but correctly routed). A sample would be:
http://www.freerepublic.com/3137836/posts
instead of the current:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3137836/posts
That would save money every month, because every single page serve would drop a bunch of unneeded characters in the URLs, not just in the browser location box, but literally every internal link on the page, which is what, three, four each and every post?
Navigation and finding things would be greatly simplified in the process, the server would be getting the same work done in less time, less wear and tear, and all this would spiff the interface as well as cut down on duplication. We’d all get much more out of the experience.
Phase three would be housecleaning, basically search and replace all those existing links throughout the message database, shortening them to the new form, and even dropping the http://www.freerepublic.com part.
- Such housecleaning would also clean up all the user links pages, updating the URLs, and checking the really old-style ones to see if they actually point anywhere. If they don’t, they’d be left there, but “[dead link]” added to the beginning of the tag.
- The links page editor would be altered, so that instead of sorting when served, it would be sorted when saved, and then served like any other page. That would also simplify editing.
- The links would be just the title of the page linked, and that duplicative but non-functional URL string eliminated. The editor would also be two hot fields (name and URL) and a “delete this link” checkbox, for each entry to make it simpler to use.
- Locations are often blank, the blank ones should be set to a new one, “Earth”, because I’m sure everyone on FR lives on Earth, despite some of the stuff that gets posted.
- It would be nice to add the rest of the countries, and maybe territories, based on the CIA World Factbook data.
Well, that was fun.
Start small.
Maybe remove “Anthrax Scare” from the list of hot topics.
Baby steps.
;’) The number of views should probably govern that, with some rotating fixed topics (like that 777 story, Ukraine, campaign 2014). ;’)
:’)
If there’s too many posts freepers don’t get to know each other... Civ - you always put thought into your choices but there have been times in the past when some posters seemed to be dumping anything just to see their in the first spot..
I think most are sharing something new, but as someone pointed out up there, we’re obviously not reading. The threads do okay, and a lot of names are in those threads. :’) And thank you for the kind remarks, GOPJ!
But yeah, if the duplicate (or duplicative) topics were mostly gone, we would get to know each other better. I’m not sure how many topics we get a day, I used to count them once in a while when I was doing the GGG digest the old way.
I notice “Syria” got added to the Local Topics list about a year ago. That’s the first time I can remember the list being updated in a decade and the last.
Good ideas.
Syria and Egypt (and Cuba, not sure when that started) are in there now, if it’s the News forum.
Thanks AdmSmith!
I’ve posted about 5,600 threads and articles on FR.
In those posted articles, I guess about 50 to 70 have been dupes, or locks, or deleted threads. Many of those I did do a search that failed to find the same article, or I did a search where someone beat me by minutes or seconds posting the same articles, or I wanted to post the dupe and there was sufficient time (many hours or days - mostly ;^)) between the articles, or I just forgot.
I just forgot the very last time as I rushed it. And “curiously” someone had to harangue me about it in the “Keywords” section and that ‘of course’ got my dander up as I was in the mood.
So lets do the math on me Civ. 70 / 5600 so what do we get?
That’s about 1.25% of my posted articles or threads result in dupes for a variety of reasons. ;-) Or, I like this better, 98.75% of my posted articles are the one and only being the first posted on FR. I think that’s a better percentage than Rush’s boasted accuracy rate. Heh. :-)
We only look at failure here, but nice try. ;’) ;’) ;’)
You’ve done very well. All of my duplicates have been GGG threads, and some were dupes of very old ones (usually Blam’s) while some were dupes of very recent threads. My main problem with GGG duplicates is, getting pinged by someone to a thread, and noticing five minutes later than someone had pinged me to an earlier thread, but it was deeper in my pings page. Ah well.
Thanks.
You noted yourself that the search function isn’t reliable so that’s why there are multiple posts sometimes. Either it doesn’t work or people get lazy because it doesn’t work and don’t bother.
It really isn’t worth all the rigamarole you suggest as optionas just so you won’t have to scroll over a duplicate post.
Live with it.
Thanks. Interesting, but not particularly helpful ;)
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