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What about the 30 or 60 (or whatever) day running totals idea? Just curious, was that even worth considering? My whole idea in starting the thread was to talk about "freshening" what we were seeing. I think a lot of the repeat pics we see are a result of initial (or "old") votes.

And let me say this, lots of great discussion going on here.

Queso wrote:What about the 30 or 60 (or whatever) day running totals idea?

Sorry, I looked at it but couldn't figure out what you meant, then forgot.

Queso wrote:My opinion would be to reset this for a trailing number of days (30-60 days?). That way we have the best, and freshest, pictures from the last 30 (or whatever) days.

I think you're suggesting re-queuing the best homepaged shots by some non-AvB criteria from the last month or two, rather than the best homepaged shots by AvB from the last 4 years.

If you're not using AvB then "Best" is a bit of a blunt instrument. The only thing left that can't really be manipulated (for good or for evil) is the screening result, which is straight "yes/no". So I think we'd just have an echo a month or two later. Actually much sooner.

Let's take a look at the numbers: Using all the homepaged uploads above a given threshold from the last four years, we've had shots repeating every two months. Removing the AvB threshold altogether won't give the quantity one might expect from looking at the bell curve, because the homepaged shots are almost certainly toward the top of the range (I don't know, but I'd guess so); also, a 5-point drop already resulted in a noticeable drop in suitability for the homepage, so taking that brake off altogether seems like a really bad idea. In other words, we can barely keep the queue stuffed with 4 years' worth to choose from.

That being the case, I don't see how we can ever have enough to fill the queue from the last month/two months without repeating just a week or two later. From the PMs the stuffer sends me, we go for weeks getting well under half what we need from new uploads, so actually we'd have to run that new stuff 3 or 4 times in very quick succession to keep the queue full - or go out to practically a year, at which point we'd be doing practically what we do now, minus the popularity/suitability check. Plus the truly epic stuff from the first three years never gets a sniff at the homepage; one could argue that it's had more than enough already, but newer members - and the casual visitors we want to grab - weren't around when that was happening.

I'll grant you that only picking the recent stuff does remove the "wouldn't pass screening nowadays" issue, but given our current uploads I don't see how it works without repeating shots even more quickly. And as I say, it does kill off the really good classics.

We'd also lose a key element of what makes us different, namely that it isn't all decided by a bunch of screeners.

So, all in all, I don't think it would work as I've understood it. Of course, I may have misunderstood it.

One thing that could be done relatively easily is to remove those old "featured on the homepage" comments once they're above a certain age. If we see something amazing and want to homepage it, we don't really care about three years ago. We want to know when it went up last, and not much else. Culling those comments would avoid that "stale" look you showed us in the screenshot.

Can we link the AvB threshold to the upload date?

I'm thinking something like this:

Code: Select all


  Upload date     AvB threshold
=================================
  < 1 month = no auto-queue / screener decision only
  1-3 months          60.0
  3-6 months          62.5
  6-12 months         65.0
  12-18 months        67.5
  > 18 months         70.0


That way, we would make sure that older shots need a really high AvB score to re-appear on the homepage.

Add raising the period between 2 homepage appearances to 6 months, and we should get a greater variety of shots on the homepage - some older, but really amazing shots, and some maybe-not-that-spectacular, but newer photos.

Zak wrote:Can we link the AvB threshold to the upload date?

I'm thinking something like this:

Code: Select all


  Upload date     AvB threshold
=================================
  < 1 month = no auto-queue / screener decision only
  1-3 months          60.0
  3-6 months          62.5
  6-12 months         65.0
  12-18 months        67.5
  > 18 months         70.0


That way, we would make sure that older shots need a really high AvB score to re-appear on the homepage.

If that CAN be done, its a winner.

Zak wrote:Can we link the AvB threshold to the upload date?

Yes "we" can, because "we" have access to the code, so knock "ourselves" out.

It's an interesting idea.

Generally speaking, I would think that stepped thresholds like that are harder to achieve than a linear increase with age with hard limits. Something like

* least-recently homepaged shot
* whose AvB >= the smaller of (70) or (60+0.02*daysOld)

My caffeine hasn't kicked in yet, so I can't wrap my brain around what would happen yet.

But it does mean code changes, and I don't know when I'll find time.

ShanwickOceanic wrote:So, all in all, I don't think it would work as I've understood it. Of course, I may have misunderstood it.

No, it looks like you have a good lock on where I was going, and your layout of the reality of how it would work makes a lot of sense. Thanks for considering it.

ShanwickOceanic wrote:One thing that could be done relatively easily is to remove those old "featured on the homepage" comments once they're above a certain age. If we see something amazing and want to homepage it, we don't really care about three years ago. We want to know when it went up last, and not much else. Culling those comments would avoid that "stale" look you showed us in the screenshot.

I think that is a good idea and probably needs to be done.

CentrelinePhoto wrote:If that CAN be done, its a winner.

I agree, this would be good. It might take some fine-tuning to get it just how we want it, but this seems like it might be worth a try. We can always go back to the current system if it doesn't work, right?

Zak wrote:Can we link the AvB threshold to the upload date?I'm thinking something like this:

That's not a bad idea, but one philosophical question:

Is the intent with the homepage (even for older shots) to showcase only popular shots, or to showcase popular shots and those other shots that are simply exceptional?

Because popularity (as determined by AvB) =/= exceptional (as determined by screeners, and to a lesser extent, photo loves).

I know there are a lot of simply awesome shots that would never get on the homepage anymore, if they had to have a very high AvB score.

Just a thought.

Another way of handling (some of?) the older stuff is to send it through screening again to see whether it's still up to scratch, rather than sending it directly into the homepage queue.

Philosophical objections aside, it'd mean that the screening queue would have to be kept low or the homepage queue would run out anyway.

ShanwickOceanic wrote:Another way of handling (some of?) the older stuff is to send it through screening again to see whether it's still up to scratch, rather than sending it directly into the homepage queue.

Not sure that's a good idea. The workload on the screeners would grow bigger and bigger with the db growing.

vikkyvik wrote:Is the intent with the homepage (even for older shots) to showcase only popular shots, or to showcase popular shots and those other shots that are simply exceptional?

Because popularity (as determined by AvB) =/= exceptional (as determined by screeners, and to a lesser extent, photo loves).

Again - the first decision on whether or not a photo will be homepaged is made by the screeners.

AvB only comes into play when we have to auto-fill the queue with older shots. That also gives shots a chance that did not pass screening.

There are still a few shots that I would have homepaged, but that weren't selected by the screeners and that have only an average AvB score. That's life. There is no failproof system, not least because there is no mathematical approach to determine the homepage-worthiness of a shot.

Zak wrote:Not sure that's a good idea. The workload on the screeners would grow bigger and bigger with the db growing.

Not really, if you're only doing it for shots that you're planning to use for backfill. Instead of routing directly the HPQ, throw them in QQ.

Worst case it's 24 a day, plus possibly a small margin (small because most of them are still good enough). And as the site grows and more homepage-worthy shots come in each day, there's less need for backfill.

Ah okay, gotcha.

But then, we'd lose the chance of homepaging the odd shot that the screeners didn't like, while the audience does. I'm not saying that our screeners don't do a great job - they do. But no screening process can ever be perfect.

Zak wrote:Again - the first decision on whether or not a photo will be homepaged is made by the screeners.AvB only comes into play when we have to auto-fill the queue with older shots. That also gives shots a chance that did not pass screening.

Sorry, I may not have been clear.

What I'm referring to are shots that DID pass screening due to being very unusual or exceptional for whatever reason, but have an AvB score of, say, 64. That would mean they would only be eligible for the homepage for 6 months (based on your suggested AvB threshold growth).

My point being, there are shots that passed screening, which I think are phenomenal shots, but they don't necessarily have the highest AvB scores.

Am I the only one on that's totally lost on this thread?

Anyway, I support whatever changes are made to make the Homepage featured shots more varied.

For what it's worth, the older "homepaged" comments are now suppressed when viewing a photo. They're all still in the database, so if staff find that not seeing the full history is a problem we can add an exemption.

Curving the AvB re-queue threshold by age needs more thought than I can give it at the moment, but I'll get back to it. Some day.

ShanwickOceanic wrote:For what it's worth, the older "homepaged" comments are now suppressed when viewing a photo. They're all still in the database, so if staff find that not seeing the full history is a problem we can add an exemption.

Not entirely sure what the point of that is, to be honest. But that aside, does this mean it's actually more difficult to tell how often a particular shot has been homepaged?

I've been watching some of mine that have made the homepage recently, and I think some of them are shots that had only made it once or twice before (or never). But if the older comments are suppressed, I may not actually know that.

Is that correct?

Yes, that's exactly right. The original issue was that there were too many "Homepaged" comments; now there aren't. I think the cutoff was 200 days, any older than that aren't shown.

ShanwickOceanic wrote:Yes, that's exactly right. The original issue was that there were too many "Homepaged" comments; now there aren't. I think the cutoff was 200 days, any older than that aren't shown.

Hmmm, OK. I guess I don't see the harm those comments were doing, but no big deal.

Another related thought on a way to spread homepage postings around (if someone already suggested this, sorry):

Is there a way to limit frequency of homepaging a photo based on how many times it has been homepaged? In essence, that would limit the posting of older shots, to "make room" for newer shots.

So, after a shot has been homepaged 5 times, it's only eligible once every 3 months; after 10 times, once every 6 months....something like that.

Personally, I think that is better than raising the AvB threshold for older shots. But I'm sure there are reasons that it might not be such a good idea.

The idea in itself isn't a bad one, at least I can't see any flaws in it, but it sounds a lot harder to implement than a curved AvB threshold.