🏀 KuBuckets Archive

Let's talk board format!

This can be divided into three and possibly four categories - the enhancements for nodebb, bugs to report to nodebb (keep in mind we're a version behind so its possible bugs/enhancements will be addressed in the new version), board usage standards (this includes front page html and daily threads and pinning/locking threads, as well as whether news stories should be moved from inside threads up to top post, general etiquette stuff), and delegation of responsibility if people want to pitch in on something besides the awesome stuff you guys are already writing.

Obviously theres a sweet spot between fascism and communism, or something like that.

So keep / change / stay the same, here's a place to talk about it.

So the current issue we're experimenting with is the layout on the front page. The previous layout was unsustainable because it's a manual effort to populate it with the stories. We wanted to move the ability to drive traffic through a static layout into threads to make it more dynamic and utilize the features teh board already offers.

So at first, we put the links in the daily news posts, but this felt cluttered and people's posts from previous days were getting buried.

To try to address this, we split it into its own daily threads post, and tried to tightly couple this with the daily news post for the day, as well as link to previous posts of the same type, thus allowing chained browsing.

However, this approach was intended to allow everyone with thread rights (if you see thread tools button at the end of this post, you have it) to assist in adding stories on the top post of both of the sister threads (news and daily threads) . We got a little bit of help from a few guys (thanks @dylans and @wishawk -- I see you guys!) on the news post. This was great. I think we still need a standards doc so everyone can feel comfortable assisting. Sorry this is still forthcoming. We got sidetracked brainstorming on the daily threads format.

So, I think my action item is to still generate the standards doc for the two formats, which can evolve if we want to change it up some. I'd like to know if you guys are interested in pitching in on modifying the top posts for those two threads as the stories come in? Let's be honest, if the answer is no, then we'll have to rethink this.

I intend to generate scripts that will create the initial post for both at midnight, allowing us then to come in behind it and fill in the template with content.

@icthawkfan316

Jaybate - that all sounds great. I guess the only thing that is giving me trouble navigating is that the posting seems to be all over the place. On kusports.com, we all usually gravitated towards the daily Bedore article. That was the main forum. For example, I posted something today thinking I would get responses (I posed a question to posters), but I think the thread went stale and the majority of the conversation went elsewhere. I do like the notifications here, and being able to follow our favorites.

This is a great point so I ported it over from another thread. So I thought that aggregating the posts into a single post would aggregate traffic through a single post, and it did for the days prior to the daily threads post's inception. However, those days were around the Ok St game, which we've all been waiting for, so it may have been anomalously large for that reason as well..

So, assuming traffic stabilizes and drives through the daily news post for all the news stories, you could post on that thread for the equivalent of the Bedore story, to address a common audience. We didnt want to do this on the daily threads post, because we wanted traffic to discuss on the threads themselves, so we locked the main post.

I'm not sure if it will play out like we intend, but that was the reasoning.

It does concern me that with separation of a lot of threads, it can fracture readership, and theres the problem that threads can go dead quickly. We've increased the volume of threads we were generating recently I think, which was part of the impetus for moving away from having to update the home page, instead pushing it into a thread.

So I wonder, if we are diligent about updating the main daily posts and daily threads post as a community, with all the posts linked to from there, how would this affect where people write comments?

Currently in the process of writing some automation scripts to seed our 2 daily posts. This will make the shell of the two posts have very consistent format, which should help.

@approxinfinity SWEET! That's going to make management a lot easier. Thanks!

@bskeet cheers! (beer)

@approxinfinity let me know if you want help testing your scripts.. Are they going to pick up new threads as they are created and add them to the Daily Threads post?

@bskeet absolutely, I should have the scripts done for the shells soon and I will share them with you (they're about half way done now, guys. You might catch me setting up the stories with them, where you'll see the posts half complete before we fill out the rest). @bskeet, let's pull up so we can get you set up to execute them. Right now, kicking off those automated scripts will be manual.

I'm thinking the mining of other sites for stories will be difficult to automate, but also fun. Pulling the stories won't be hard, but determining whether there is a story to pull, and whether the story pertains to the Jayhawks I think will be a bit challenging. If you have an idea for the rules the scripts would have to follow to figure out a story is one we should pull (if theres a feed specific to Jayhawks bball for a site, it might be nice and neat, if not, it might be something like "go to [site name's sports page url].. search in the titles for the words "Jayhawk" or "KU" and "basketball", go to the story, pull the image (if that site always has a good image with their stories) etc. We could build in some conditional logic too. This might be a fun exercise for anyone else too if anyone wants to bite off a piece of this. If I have the scripts written in a user story format, I can write out the code to make it happen.

@approxinfinity Sounds cool. Hope the challenges prove to be fun for you.