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So, as per usual, I like to occasionally check the pulse on the community to make sure that people for the most part are happy and satisfied with the day-to-day operation of the site. For those of you who are new to the community, first, let me welcome you and explain how these work.
When I open the floor to the community, the intent is to provide a venue to discuss anything related to site operations, content, and anything along those lines. I actively review and comment on these posts, and if one issue pops up multiple times in comments, I generally run follow up articles to try and help address issues the community feels is important before someone decides to take rehash and form a spinoff. Feel free to leave whatever thoughts you want below.
In contrary to my usual posts, I don't have that much to say to this, so to both the community and editorial team's relief, I'll cut this off right here before it becomes Yet Another NCommander Novel.
~ NCommander
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 07 2016, @03:52PM
Yup, it would. Pretty sure we can squeeze this in for the next site update. Issue added to the tracker for now though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @04:05PM
Or make the "queue low" message at the top of the home page into a permanent message.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @06:21PM
Yeah, just setting the threshold of showing up to something like 1000 articles should do the trick.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday November 07 2016, @06:52PM
If we make the Queue Low message permanent it just becomes meaningless and eventually is ignored.
Unfortunately, it often doesn't do what it is hoped it would either, or at least I haven't been able to correlate the number of submissions received with the appearance or otherwise of the warning notice.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 07 2016, @10:45PM
I definitely notice it. When it appears I always try to submit something, even if a slow news day means a thin story or two. In the past I used to have fun seeing if I could single-handedly make it go away, but thankfully these days many more people submit and it's seldom necessary.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 08 2016, @11:52AM
That's because you're a submitting badass.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:08PM
When I see the message, I'll take a look at the queue and submit something if I have time. If the Pending Stories list is close to empty, then I'll basically force myself to submit something (even if it is a Slow News Day submission) and I'll pop into the IRC channel and put out a request to any available editors to review the new submissions.
My average submission rate is probably only around six per month, but they are stacked at times when they are needed.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday November 08 2016, @10:23AM
It's actually more or less work as intended. On several occasions before it existed, we ran out of articles entirely, and publication stopped. I don't think we've actually had the queue go to zero since it was implemented.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday November 08 2016, @10:34AM
Well, I'm not sure that the message can take all the credit for that. What we can do now is run 'Arthur', the bot which does the searching for stories and basic preparatory processing, and then we have some material to work with. It is not as good as a genuine submission, but it can help us fill the gaps when there is nothing in the queue worth processing.
Arthur can find at least 100 stories a day, and sometimes finds several hundred (431 is the highest for far in my experience), but it is not yet fully automatic and it is not always popular with the community.
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Monday November 07 2016, @09:48PM