[matt]

We're testing a change to the default sort order of front page stories. You can return to the old default by clicking "Recently Promoted".

What do you think about the change? Love it? Hate it?

[gdboling]

Hate is a strong word. But I don't like it. I'd rather just see the most recently promoted. I didn't see that message for a few hours at the top so I just kept thinking dzone was having a slow Friday.

[michele.mauro]

I prefer the Recent Promoted version, too. But it's just a matter of habit. If your usual interaction with Dzone is "scanning the top n articles that I have'nt read yet", you need the old list. But for a new user, or for different interaction patterns, the top articles may be useful.
Maybe, if I would like to check the site just once a day (evening or morning round-up) and have time just for 10 or 20 articles, with the new view I can have them at a glance and discard those that the community labeled as not interesting.

Michele

[gdboling]

Why not let it be per user? So I can go into my settings and tell dzone what view I want as the default.

[rick]

I think there's a NEED for a per-user preference setting here. It's simply one of those situations where "one size fits all" never really fits anyone very well. There are at least two significant groups of users who must be considered:

1 - The Regulars: Our most important and most valued members. The people who really make the site happen and who contribute to its energy and usefulness in myriad ways. This is a small, but super-crucial segment, perhaps only 1% to 2% of the population. Regulars (like me) may hit the site multiple times per day to see what's new, cast votes, and participate in other ways.

2 - The Snackers: The overwhelming majority of the audience, and largely composed of people who have a minute or two to spare and come to DZone in hopes of quickly finding something to read. Snackers typically aren't logged in, and they don't visit with the same frequency as Regulars. Once per day is a reasonable approximation of the average frequency of visits.

There's no single setting which really best serves these two groups. Since DZone generally promotes about 70-80 stories per day, the simple fact is that the Snackers are likely to miss about 70% of the stories if they only visit once per day. What the Snackers really want is to see the MOST INTERESTING and POPULAR stories.

The Regulars, on the other hand, may even be specifically focused on watching the progress of a single story throughout the day, and they almost invariably want to see the most recent changes.

SO...

There's no way we can accommodate both groups with one setting, and I believe we need to support a per-user preference setting immediately. Any logged-in user should be able to enjoy the site the way he/she prefers it.

If you're not logged in, however, we need to assume that you're a Snacker or a first-timer, and it's probably best to show you a default sort of most active and/or most popular stories.

We think we can make this easy for everyone, and we're working on it right now. There's no question that a new per-user preference is required, so we'll get one in place right away.

Rick

[topnotch]

I just wanted to chime in and let it be known that the recently promoted view is much more intuitive for frequent users looking for new content. When you refresh the view the first thing most users want to see is the new content.
However, I must say that rick makes a good point about the two different classes of readers. I think having settings like sort options being saved as name value pairs in a cookie would probably work well. Either that or values could be saved as part of a user's account information. A combination of both may be needed for old and new users.

[amrlafi]

I liked it ! actually i visit Dzone like 20 times per day and didn't get the technique for the old sorting !

[rick]

The model we're testing now uses a completely different mechanism than anything we've used before. We've enhanced the scoring system and added a step that gives strength to newer items.

We'll see if this produces interesting results.

[amrlafi]

great , also sometimes items repeated on scrolling down ...