Ask DN: limiting MOTD

over 4 years ago from , UI Developer and Designer

Dear DN ,

I'm aware of feature requests page, but I thought this is important and decided to post it here.

The community is growing fast. You can observe this with 1. Sometimes new posts can't reach front page, they diminish on the second page without people reading it 2. Lifetime of a MOTD

I'll talk about MOTD as we can't do much for the first one.People are misusing it, advertising, writing childish sentences. Yesterday, MOTD changed 4 times (maybe 5) which is much. Because it is the motto of the day not the hour. Even though there is a silly sentence, it must stay there and people should see it and vote it. If someone typed something sucks, he should be penalized by down-voting.

Here is my humble solution: If someone updates MOTD, it must be locked for (let's say) 12 hours. No one can change in this time period. It will stay there at least 12 hours. ?f it's something nice he will get more karma, otherwise he'll bleed more karma.

16 comments

  • Allan GrinshteinAllan Grinshtein, over 4 years ago

    The MOTD is not intended to be serious, or inspirational, or useful. If it's used that way, great. If not, that's fine too. It is supposed to be chaotic.

    Locking is no fun for anyone, especially because most of the stuff written there has very little value most of the time.

    7 points
    • Ryan LeFevreRyan LeFevre, over 4 years ago (edited over 4 years ago )

      To follow up on what Allan said: the MOTD has always been an experiment. I would rather not limit it to try and control it. If offensive or abusive content is posted it will obviously be removed, but remember that it is the only place on the entire site to receive downvotes. The only kind of limiting I might be open to is requiring a minimum amount of karma before being allowed to update it.

      In regards to concerns over stories not reaching the frontpage, it's something we will look into tweaking, although typically it's because the content was not of enough interest to the community.

      0 points
    • Aaron WhiteAaron White, over 4 years ago

      The MOTD situation yesterday was interesting to watch and quite comical at times. I don' think we need to censor the personalities of the active community on this site, it's a feature that keeps drawing people back and trying to one up each other, which is great. If someone posts a stupid story/dumb cat image or an advertisement then it's up to us as the community to post something better!

      6 points
  • Tom WoodTom Wood, over 4 years ago

    Maybe you should earn the MOTD ability?

    1) Be a member of DN for x amount of time (3 months?)

    2) Have posted y amount of stories (6?)

    3) Have received z amount of karma (50?)

    4) Only be allowed one MOTD per month.

    That way x+y+z = MOTD.

    The idea being that this would only allow genuine community users to post an MOTD, and encourage responsibility.

    7 points
  • Surjith S MSurjith S M, over 4 years ago (edited over 4 years ago )

    Good Idea... but

    it must be locked for (let's say) 12 hours.

    If someone from US updated the MOTD, Then users from other countries(like India) won't get a chance to update because its always night. :-(

    Edit:

    MOTD changed 4 times

    It's better if we can track the entire history

    3 points
    • Cihad TurhanCihad Turhan, over 4 years ago (edited over 4 years ago )

      If someone in New York updates karma like 16:00, it will be unlocked at 04:00 in New York, 14:00 in New Delhi.

      If someone in New Delhi updates at 15:00, it will be unlocked at 03:00 in New Delhi thus 17:00 in New York.

      Problem?

      1 point
  • Dominik SchmidtDominik Schmidt, over 4 years ago

    it was changed by me yesterday, because there was someone who wanted to promote his 'new' blog with the motd.

    1 point
  • Daniel GoldenDaniel Golden, over 4 years ago

    Where are the DN mods & admins in this thread? We're dying for some input from you guys.

    1 point
  • Robert BusbyRobert Busby, over 4 years ago

    The problem with your idea is even if the MOTD is bad, the contents could still make people upvote it. The advertisement you are talking about yesterday is the perfect example. It had the word Apple and iPad in it and these are automatic upvote words in design communities no matter what.

    Jim S stepped up and removed it when he shouldn't need to.

    0 points
  • Thom StoodleyThom Stoodley, over 4 years ago

    It should have a queue system implemented as I think the timeframe solution is fair, are you really gonna hang around on DN for 12 hours? Likewise if the post gets downvoted over 10 times for example it could be automatically removed and the next MOTD made visible.

    I thought the original idea of MOTD was to add a bit more fun to DN and it's great that anyone can post to it but remember not everyone has the same sense of humour.

    There could also be a set of rules that every user agrees to when they sign up or post to message of the day to ensure no misuse.

    0 points
  • EJ FoxEJ Fox, over 4 years ago

    I have always felt that we should just not allow links in the MOTD. It is way nicer when it is quotes or advice or a quick little tip, imo.

    Maybe just links that end in .gif

    0 points
  • Dirk HCM van BoxtelDirk HCM van Boxtel, over 4 years ago (edited over 4 years ago )

    Being the owner of the current childish sentence, and two others over the past week, I'd like to say that I put those words there because there was a pretty poorly received (much downvoted) message up there at the time. I'm pretty sure my messages got a fair amount of upvotes though, if that matters.

    And to actually add to the discussion; perhaps we shouldn't be allowed to add a new one until the current one has either:

    1) been up there for longer than 24 hours (message of the day)

    2) been down-voted twice as much as upvoted, with a minimum of 15 votes cast.

    For those wondering, I can only recall two of my MOTD's, the current one (which is a reference to how it can be quite hard to convince clients about certain facts with reason alone, but is quite corny and can be considered childish) and "hate the trend, not the pattern" a day or so ago.

    0 points
https://www.designernews.co/stories/10063
www.designernews.co
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
49654
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:QSO74PCWPUICSUTTZEAX4HRELJSORMTD
<urn:uuid:7eae533c-1820-40cb-a13b-10a98623cbe8>
2018-02-25T09:55:16Z
23.23.207.44
text/html
sha1:RDPEA7RP44VAEYL2UI3KYQGN4UZ2EO5R
<urn:uuid:3624a2ab-9fca-4f67-a780-1eef7c623211>
https://www.designernews.co/stories/10063
length
response
<urn:uuid:2c0d947b-7bd1-4588-8f58-607b4f7a978c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-141-213-112.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf