Brainstorm

Making important news visible

Posted on 2010-01-17 11:27 UTC by Greg Roberts. Status: Under consideration, Categories: maemo.org.

Description of Problem:

In the last few months there have been quite alot of key threads and quick news on the Talk pages... within days there are normally 10-20 extras posts of people not realising, for example the servers are down, or the upgrade is out etc....

Why :

So i have created this brainstorm in the hope that a simple solution for all can be had :) - this will help the moderators and users trying to help, and also other users trying to find information. It will also help centralise some discussions.

I have added a few brainstorm solutions below - please add more if you feel there is a decent solution.

Talk Forums link

Solutions for this brainstorm

Solution #1: Talk - Breadcrumb trail - Latest news

Posted on 2010-01-17 11:27 UTC by Greg Roberts.

The first suggestion is for a mod/admin to keep a daily title bar up to date. - it could be scrolling, but would work in static form.

This title bar needs to be clear and visible to users joining the site.

For example it could say:

(date/time) Maemo.org Server upgrade - Having server problems, Application repositories affected, see here for more information
(date/time) News update - Nokia N900 Firmware update out TODAY! - see here for more information...

A picture example from JOPPU can be found here

Solution #2: Important news talk forum

Posted on 2010-01-17 11:28 UTC by Greg Roberts.

Have a specific area for important talk news and updates.

I'd expect this to be closed news threads - and removed frequently to archives so that only a few are ever in there at one time. This avoids clutterness, and makes spotting news important.

Solution #3: Push relevant Talk Threads to maemo.org/news

Posted on 2010-01-17 12:39 UTC by Quim Gil.

The place to follow the news of the Maemo community is http://maemo.org/news/ . There should be a way to push there the best threads as soon as they are growing. Automatically, in order to avoid manual overhead. Based on everybody's ratings, in order to avoid overhead from a busy bunch of moderators/editors. If someone wants to pick manually a thread she can always have a blog aggregated to Planet Maemo and blog at will about any activity a Talk.

If this solution is well receive then we can discuss further about the implementation details but one example of criteria to be pushed to maemo.org/news could be: threads younger than 48h with at least 10 5-star votes and an average equal or higher than 4-stars. We can always fine tune depending on whether the criteria turns out to be to restrictive or lax.

No idea about the complexity of extracting from Talk that information though. Once the threads are selected they could conform a feed that maemo.org/news would sinply aggregate. Users not interested in the rest of maemo.org/news (?) could just subscribe to that feed and be done.

Solution #4: Jaffa's proposal: Maemo Weekly News

Posted on 2010-01-17 12:48 UTC by Quim Gil.

Jaffa sent a Maemo Weekly News proposal a couple of months ago:

"A weekly news digest of key useful/informative/interesting/insightful news from all Maemo news sources. Similar in style and approach to Linux Weekly News"

See the full proposal & debate in the maemo-community mailing list.

Solution #5: Force a message to new visitors

Posted on 2010-01-18 15:44 UTC by Greg Roberts.

As it has been mentioned users have different starting points across the Maemo Land. This idea allows for two / more types of forcing a message on a user.

It would require all sites to have a banner at the top or allow a loading message advising the visitor of the news.

ie. a separate framed 1 line message controlled by admins/mods.

or a popup window on first load of a main ******.maemo.org page

or an ajax styled message that is transparent on the ****.maemo.org loading pages.

Either way - it's a one lined openin gmessage of some sort on all openin pages.

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