Would it make sense to make the default activity period be a function of the recent activity on the site, and in each group?
I am a bit lazy, and I also seem to like the default 3 day filter on the activity feed... but, sometimes a person less lazy than I responds to a topic of mine which is older that 3 days. These are usually good responses. These folks clearly played with the time filter. Other users are missing out on these responses.
I agree that a 3 day filter may be the ideal filter at the normal activity level of Tildes at large, at this point. But Tildes is still really fluctuating in activity, as may other sites based on the codebase. This may be an even bigger issue in specific groups.
Would there be any workable and beneficial way to make the default time filter a function of recent activity? This may apply to the main feed, and each group feed. This would help in site/group times of low activity, and might scale to the much higher activity of the future.. does this make any sense at all?
Would it be better to make the default time filter a function of activity, instead of a arbitrary setting which an admin selected?
Edit: the list box label might default to a dynamic “recent”, or similar, and then still have the other options of “last 1 hour, last 12 hours,” etc...
Good suggestion. Currently for example ~anime is primarily weekly topics which would naturally benefit from having a 7-day activity threshold. If you pick the wrong day to visit with the default 3-day threshold it looks completely dead.
On the other hand, high-traffic groups like ~news dominate the homepage and a lower activity threshold would be good to shuffle out topics faster, and which also naturally makes sense given the definition of "news."
Ideally once we have the trust system and it's producing actual moderators, those mods would be able to set the 'default' view for their group to be whatever suits its content and activity levels, with the users who haven't changed that preference yet getting whatever the mods decide. Users could then choose to override that default and set their own preference for browsing that group - a simple override. This would give us the best of both worlds I think, and without the need to try to find a programmatic solution that won't really be a 'good fit' because there's no one-size-fits-all solution to every group.
No, sorry. I'm totally lost. (Not that I can do anything about your suggestion - I'm just a random passer-by.) I'm not clear what you're suggesting.
You seem to be suggesting that the time period for sorting should change when old threads are active. So, if a user has their sorting set to "Activity - 3 days", but a comment is added on a 5-day-old topic, the sort should change to "Activity - 5 days" in order to include that old topic. However, assuming that I understand your suggestion correctly (and I'm not sure that I do!), this would work exactly the same way as the existing "Activity - All time" sort, because that sort filter picks up all activity from old topics, while you're suggesting that the sort filter should pick up all activity from old topics. They seem the same to me - which is why I'm pretty sure I'm not understanding your suggestion properly.
Oh, I just meant topic posting activity. Say that a group only had 10 topics posted per week, then maybe the default activity filter should be longer than 3 days.
So each group would have its own separate default sort?
Would this separate default sort for each group be determined algorithmically, or would Deimos (and/or future moderators) set it manually, or would the user be able to enter their own custom sort criteria?
As an interim work-around, are you aware that you can already set the default sort separately for each group you're subscribed to? If you want to, you can open any group and set its default sort to "Activity - 9 days" or "Activity - 15 days" or any other period you want (it's the "other period" option in the drop-down menu).
I was not aware that each group had unique sorts, thanks.