Blotanical News

Thanks for all the great comments and suggestions from the last post regarding your experiences with the speed modifications and possibility of changes to the Post Picking area.

I want to outline my ideas for how this new scoring regime might happen and seek your comments, suggestions and opinions before I embark on creating it all. From my point of view I think it will be a far superior scoring system but I'm keen to hear your ideas as well, and if you think it combats all that people are hoping to achieve with posts and picks.

Making Pickers READ Posts

Firstly, let's understand that no system will be completely infallible in achieving this but we can certainly tinker toward this end. A few Blotanists have suggested that we score blogs on whether they receive comments or not. Unfortunately, this requires extra code to be placed on your blog and most blogging Blotanists run Blogger or Wordpress blogs that don't accept scripts - major challenge!

The second flaw with this is how do we value a comment. Should "Great post. Thanks!" be valued the same as a comment from someone who has written paragraphs of very useful information? Obviously not. So how do we weigh up which comments score and which ones don't! IMHO, I suggest we don't even go down this path.

A Possible Solution

So, my solution is that we implement a 'reading-comprehension-style-voting-system'. This works like such: when a Blotanist goes to Pick a post they are required to also click one of (12?) possible categories for the post demonstrating why they enjoyed the post. For example, "Great Writing", "Brilliant Photos", "Helpful Garden Tips" or even "Non-Specific Post". For this the Blotanist gets one (1) point.

The writer of the post also categorises their post similarly and scores ten (10) points for that - the higher points to encourage the blogger to categorise. If the blogger and the picking Blotanist's choices match then the picker ends up with an extra three (3) points for their pick - a total of four (4) points.

I'm also contemplating whether the posting Blotanist should be awarded one (1) point for every Pick their post receives. Plus, another one to consider is whether we double points earned by non-blogging Blotanists.

The challenges

As with everything there are always downsides and this solution is not exception. Firstly, what if the posting Blotanist doesn't categorise their post? Or, what if the posting Blotanist deliberately selects an option that has nothing to do with their post?

In response to the first challenge we can make a time limit (ie 7 days) for a Blotanist to categorise their post. If they fail to do this within that time period then we take the majority vote approach and award pickers if they were in the majority group who categorised the post similarly.

The second challenge could be counteracted by way of review. That is, Blotanists can click a Review This Post button which requests someone (possibly a Guru member) to make an overiding decision on which category the post should be. This may, in turn, award Guru's with extra points for doing this and charge Blotanists points for requesting a review if it goes against them.

Over To You

So there you go, the cards are on the table and I'm keen to hear your opinions and thoughts. Feel free to request more detail if you feel it's missing or add suggestions for how this process could work better.

PS. Just as a side note, I am still investigating a Level higher than Guru for the future but it won't happen until after the upgrade.

Posted by Stuart at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (55)

To be honest, the PICKS section of Blotanical is always undergoing some form of update. Members make great suggestions or point out problems that fixes often become more helpful for themselves and other Blotanists.

Over the next week though you should start to some major changes being applied to this area. I'll be rolling them out individually after testing to make sure they're not going to throw out too many bugs. As each one comes out I'll try and explain the change and why the modifications were made.

So, the first 'cab off the rank' is the Popular Posts page. This is the page you arrive on when you first click the Picks tab. While we did modify it quite considerably in the middle of last year, it needed some extra changes to help an ever-growing Blotanical community.

Change #1: SPEED
This page was getting a little tardy in the speed department so it has been sped up quite considerably - and will continue to speed up even more over the next few weeks. In actual fact, you should notice that this page is twice is fast to load the first time and each time you load thereafter it should be even faster. The goal will always be to make it faster than it is with even more functionality added to it.

Change #2: POPULAR POSTS FRESHNESS
When Blotanical was in its infancy, this page correlated the picks data based on a 5-day cycle. We then cut it down to 4 days (unfortunately an old page slipped in since the server update and it reverted back to the 5 day cycle) and now it's been reduced to a 2 day cycle. Hopefully we shall reduce this down to a 24 hour cycle meaning the freshness of popular posts will be even crunchier!

Change #3: TOP PICKERS
This may seem like we're encouraging Blotanists to just become Picking junkies to make it onto these lists - and I'm sure we'll cop some flak for this. However, while not in place just yet - and may still be a week or two away - a new Picking score system is due soon. This new format aims to encourage Blotanists to "READ" the posts rather than just Pick them for points. It will become much harder to 'game' and in future bloggers will be rewarded for their posts.

As always, I'm keen to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

Posted by Stuart at 6:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Some members lost a heap of points when the site broke a few weeks ago. Many of the older Picks had become corrupted in the upgrade and so no longer counted towards profile points.

However, I took the difference between your amassed points as at 18 Feb 2010 and your current total, and added any that you had accrued since then. Hopefully, the result is the amount of points that you should have had if nothing had changed.

I'm sure you'll let me know if they aren't!! ;-) lol.

Posted by Stuart at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

At last it seems that some semblance of order is beginning to appear at Blotanical.com. The rumour mills, Tweets and emails have been going berzerk since the site dropped off the edge of cyber-space last month. So, this post is to try and clear up some of the confusion and hopefully answer a few of the many questions that have since arisen.

Firstly, "No", this was not the update I've been promising - that is still in the pipeline and this little fiasco has slowed the process even more. Instead, a few days before I was about to renew my contract with my server host they emailed me advising that the package I used was no longer going to be offered. Plus, I had 7 days to find a new one.

While 7 days to download your site's pages and data may seem like a long time it isn't when you need to; source another option that is going to be more reliable, fit in your day job, suffer an electricity blackout because some young goon has gone and set fire to the wetlands (not as wet as one might expect in the middle of summer) behind us plus all the other necessities of life.

Needless to say I didn't get 'round to adding this post before I needed to hastily exit. I've had a few emails forwarded to me suggesting that I should have written a post or emailed everybody but unfortunately when your data is all tied up in gzipped files it doesn't allow such a luxury. Instead, I tried tweeting a few messages using my @bussogardener profile. In future I shall use my @Blotanical one instead so it may pay, even if you don't like to use Twitter, to follow this one just so I can inform you if faults occur and other forms of communication aren't available.

Once with the new hosting company there were a few issues that had to be sorted out and this cost us extra time. I won't bore you with the details except to say that some of the problems were purely coincidental. The timing of some security issues just happened to occur at the same time as the site was trying to get up.

Many members have been mentioning that their points and status levels have dropped since the initial fault. This should be rectified within the next few days as I write some code to handle the differences. This won't affect the points that you amass at the moment.

As for that much anticipated update - I have a few changes that will roll within the next week or so. These are primarily to do with making the Picks section much quicker and hopefully easier to navigate. They do include some of your suggestions and I shall explain them when they come out.

I just want to thank you all for being so patient with me, and Blotanical, and hope that the relationships that have been forged weren't too badly bruised in the mix-up.

Posted by Stuart at 8:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)