Complaints Popular Threads Right Now

LW

Community Manager
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Apr 2, 2016
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See that prefix? Get popcorn, I'm back with these.

The Popular Threads section of the Home Page sucks. Here's the TL;DR why, the arguments will be explained below:
  • Half the time Links don't even work
  • It promotes Spam
Let's tackle these one step at a time, starting off with

It promotes Spam
This is a pain in the ass. The thing just takes random Posts that have received a (Sometimes even no) View in the last Hour and calls them Trending. This might work on Sites with Millions of continuously active Users and thousands of Threads being posted a day but not for this. Always lovely when we have one of those spam attacks and all I need to do is load the thread once to flag it before noticing the one view I did on it caused it to be pushed to the front page.
upload_2018-1-11_21-30-18.png
Great. I did that.

Half the Links don't even work
This is something that has recently stopped happening but there kept on being threads like this:
chrome_2017-11-06_15-00-06.png
that got pushed to the Popular List, clicking on the link would give you a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS. Sidenote how come all of these get sent there with 0 Replies and 0 Views. Great popularity I see there.

TL;DR the feature needs ironing and a better definition on what constitutes "popular".
 

Koala_Steamed

Mythic User
The popular thing works on how many people are viewing the thread at the moment. I might just remove it as we don't really have enough users viewing the forums for it to accurately show popular threads.

ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS thing is when you go from the main forum board to the Chinese forums, still not sure why it does that. It works fine with the other languages
 
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