Quote:
Originally Posted by FC
Agreed.
Maybe keep a sub-forum for news-related posts with permanent links to Jalopnik, etc.?
The only fear I have is that this being a low-transit site, despite the terrible STN, sometimes those prompt some discussions, and without them the participation may go even lower.
I'm probably just overthinking it. You'd think something would exist out there to filter RSS feeds to more focused subjects/key words?
I sure don't want to add work to anyone, so I vote for whatever is easiest. But it is a PITA to see 25 new threads and most of them being of low to no value.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ff
Seems like it should be easy to filter out some of the known useless and repetitive posts. For instance, the junkyard ones always start with "Junkyard Gem: ". I've never seen the administrative interface for vBulletin, though. Can you do filtering, or inject custom logic (PHP or JS)?
If it's worth it, I'll be happy to volunteer my time with the programming part.
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We are multiple versions behind on vB. Their support for customizing RSS stuff was never great and a bit hit or miss at the time we stopped upgrading. ayn has further limits of what can be done on his box. Customization can be done, but you are forever at the mercy of those putting out the feed...and they make changes often. When we first started with it, I did some, but then stopped because it was way too much effort for the results.
If we cut the RSS stuff, I don't think it will cause a meaningful drop in use of the board. Attached are screenshots of the Jalopnik and Autoblog forums over the past year sorted by thread views. You can also see posts to those threads. Remember these things:
The first view is generated with posting and every time there's a post, at least 1 additional view is created.
Many of the posts that are worth seeing are on a topic that has a corresponding thread elsewhere, often created by someone that has blocked the RSS boards
Many of us that are still active here block the RSS boards because they're full of crap.
Basically, we're not looking at stuff there and we're not talking about stuff there. Do we really need there, there?