Published reviews algorithm? Top rated not ranked highest...

[chowell]

I'm trying to get a grasp on how the system decides what order to display the stories on the Published Reviews page (my homepage). It seems that the number of votes is irrelevant.

I must point out that I have random voting turned on for my RSS feed imports, so could that be why all stories seem to be weighted evenly?

Just looking for some clarification.

[chuckroast]

Basically it works like this... lets say you have the published set to 5 votes. so it takes 5 votes for that story to get published. you can also set the time frame in which it takes to get those 5 votes.. the order in which they appear on the front page is "first come first served".. meaning as soon as the story reaches 5 votes it goes to the front page regardless if another story had been entered in the queue (upcoming) before or after.

That's it in a nutshell but you can get more advanced by playing with the formula in the admin. For example lets say the published number is still 5 but while it was in the queue with 4 votes, 3 people buried the story. Now it might not go to the published page until the vote total reaches 7 in the specified time frame alloted.

Now for the random votes on the rss importer. Depending on what number you have your publishing set to... lets say 5 again.. One story might get a random vote total of 3 which it would throw into the queue( upcoming), and another story might get a 9 which it would put it directly on the published (front page)

I hope that helps.. I know it's kind of confusing at first..

[chowell]

I think the parts that you explained certainly make sense.

The part I'm struggling with is that stories submitted on the same day/time are being displayed all over the homepage, regardless of their vote counts. I have the system set to push the story to the homepage on 2 votes (until I build an audience/voters), so most stories go straight there and others go to the upcoming... no problems there. My confusion is how the published page will rank a story with 2 votes higher than a story with 3, 4 or 5 votes. If you look at my homepage now, the stories with 4 & 5 votes are at the bottom.

I thought the more votes (within a timeframe), the higher the story would rate automatically. They don't seem to move on my site. Again, I wonder if that's because I assigned them a random value on import of the RSS feed, so the stories all really have a "1" vote, but a random vote visually only.

Btw.. your original response is much appreciated. Thanks for taking the time.

[chuckroast]

The rss importer takes one story at a time from the feed and parses it into the database. Even though the stories all have the same submission time they are still processing one at a time. You can actually watch them process and ad each vote in the /live section of your site.. We've tried with some pretty high random vote totals and watched as each story goes through the process of adding the votes in and either moving from queued to published. It's kind of neat...

But back to your original question, once a story is on the front page it will just keep moving down until it's off the front page regardless of how many votes it gets. Then that is where the sorting features come in.. like top today, top this week, etc..

[chowell]

Ok, so the system doesn't work exactly like Digg (most popular to front page)... I understand now.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to respond.

[chuckroast]

Originally Posted by chowell

Ok, so the system doesn't work exactly like Digg (most popular to front page)... I understand now.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to respond.

Well, it kind of does work exactly like digg but by using the rss importer with random voting set to such a low total it really doesn't.

[fyrfyt]

chuckroast "Well, it kind of does work exactly like digg but by using the rss importer with random voting set to such a low total it really doesn't."

I have read through this tread, I guess my simplest question would be: What settings would I need to implement to get it to work exactly like Digg.


Great script by the way...

[grimusm]

Is it possible to get a formula closer to dig. I think maybe including some other variables such as comment votes and karma would help definetely. And also if it were possible to add some element of how quickly votes are made together, etc