It's the tops!

We’ve been working on a “top” feature in Discourse off and on for a few months. It’s a top level nav tab, here

We’ve gotten it to a good state finally, and I would like to get your feedback on the /top page.

  • Does this make sense?
  • Do you agree that what it is showing is the “top”? For each date range?
  • How could we improve this?

Note that /top picks the “best” time interval available, if there’s tons of activity it may choose Day or Week, if your site is low activity it’ll choose Month or Year.

Also, new and long-absent returning users will automatically get the /top page as their default homepage on their first visit. Logic being

“Hey new guy/gal, here’s the best stuff in this community so you can easily see what this community is all about.”

… versus arbitrarily dropping them in a raw stream of the latest topics.

Thanks for looking. Here’s a :watermelon: for you.

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sounds like a good idea in theory, but…

what does it do? right now it’s not telling me anything. I thought the “latest” algorithm bumped the popular stuff to the top of the “latest” list. “top” is the popular stuff compiled over a longer interval? Or “top” is curated?

EDIT: oh, i see I’m not supposed to just dumbly click the link, I go there and then choose the interval. Did not understand that–can you put the buttons to choose the interval big and at the top instead of small, grey, and at the bottom?

Oh, I see, you are doing top within Meta category. @zogstrip are the time ranges correctly auto-selected for this case? Does not look like they are.

Try it from the homepage proper. (but it should work within categories as well.)

uhh, maybe. I just clicked your link, dude. you’re the one who posted it in the meta category :wink:

Oooo indeed I did :blush: fixed! That is a bug we exposed though IMO, top within a category should auto-select the best date range.

http://bbs.boingboing.net/top

right on, I see what you mean, now:

This is now fixed :frog:

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Thanks for that fix. Any other feedback is welcome, and since I screwed it up originally in the first post, here’s that link again:

http://bbs.boingboing.net/top

If for some sick reason you did want to see the top all time meta topics, I can confirm, thanks to @zogstrip, this now works

http://bbs.boingboing.net/category/meta/l/top

And remember folks

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I just logged in for the first time in a while to report this: When you visit /top as a non-logged-in user the page shows you all date ranges with year listed firste.  Since most of those threads are locked it might not be the best introduction for new users.

Isn’t that kind of unavoidable here since all official boing topics auto-close after 5 days?

Still, might be some good reading in there, right? That’s the hope of /top.

And we want listening before talking, don’t we?

No.  When I visit /top now, after logging in, I see a list of mostly open topics from the last week with the option to choose different date ranges at the bottom of the page.  I suppose my question is why does the logged-out view of /top show all the date ranges at once, with the list of most-dead topics listed first, instead of what I see as a logged-in user?

When you are not logged in, we don’t know the last time we saw you – so we assume we’ve never seen you before. So we show you “all time” top.

If you are logged in, we know the last time we saw you, so we try to scale the top range to be “things we think you have not already seen”.

  • if you were last here a month ago: show /top for the last month
  • if you were last here a week ago: show /top for the last week

etc, for day, and so forth.

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