(kudra: automated discussion listings) Re: Monastery To Do (or) To Add List

[kudra]

I am a firm believer in the use of search, but reading this does make me think it would be nice to have other means of examining discussions. In particular, it would be nice to see how the monastery perceives an idea, and what vroom's intentions are regarding it. However, I don't think that it needs to be as complex as what you described. Rather, it could be little more than a listing of topics along the lines of Q&A or the tutorials page.

Unfortunately these two sections require maintenance. I would rather see a mostly automated solution for discussions. For example, discussions could be automatically added to the page after they are a week old. I say a week because that gives time for posts to be moved out of discussion if they don't belong there, to be retitled, and for people to respond, while at the same time leaving little danger that the idea will be reposted in that time. I do think the page would need to be editable, either by the site documentation clan, editors, or maybe just turnstep :). Maintenance would involve things like moving repeated discussions to be listed with the older instance.

I see the listings consisting as a few components: title, popularity and status. To go in to more detail:

• Title of the article
  This would simply be the title the author gives, which would be a link to the post. People editing the page could rename it if needed, and move a title to be listed with another title if they addressed the same thing.
• Popularity
  Popularity is one of the potential ways to order the page (and in my opinion more useful than by date or alphabetically) and so extra care should be taken in automatically generating a rating. However, this is probably the most difficult part to automate correctly. Rather than introduce a new system for this, I would suggest using the existing mechanism--voting. The problem with this proposal is that some people vote on discussions based upon how articulate the person was (I know I recently read someone urging for this kind of voting, but I can't seem to find it to link to it), whereas others vote upon whether they'd like the idea implemented (see the discussion section), and this idea relies upon the second voting pattern. Specifically, I would suggest just giving each idea a word ranking based upon how its reputation relates to norm (with the exact relationship to be worked out by looking at the reputations and responses to existing discussions).
• Status
  I'm concerned about the idea of this becoming a todo list for vroom. I do think it is nice for the users to see how the site is developing, but I also think that it is up to vroom to decide how he spends his time. I would like to see this serve as maybe a reminder of possible ideas for him, rather than a list of things he needs to do. The status field would be for the rest of us, who would like at least minor indications of how the site is developing. A simple comment from vroom along the lines of 'good idea, I should do this sometime' or 'nope, not going to happen' would take up very little of his time and would give a small idea of future plans.