Focus article of the edition + our biggest current scalability problem

[Larry Sanger]

All,

Feel free to follow up this email on Infobitt-talk (cc'd).

Going forward, I would like to make a focus article, one per edition. This is an article that we announce we are working especially hard on...so we want to dig deep, make it long, collaborate lots, use lots of sources, go to the ur-sources where possible, tap social media...

We've done this before, e.g., when I requested that we all work on a "torture report" bitt. But I would like to make this a regular feature.

Vivy might or might not have time to announce our topic choice. If you want to deputize someone for one of the editions, Vivy, please do.

Heads up: a few annoying bugs start showing their nasty little heads when we work on these sorts of longer bitts, but we'll squash 'em soon enough.

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Part of my thinking here is that as we add new people we are going to get desperately overstretched with the number of bitts in our system.

I'm afraid we're going to get more people coming into the system and we might have to throttle that growth deliberately just so we can add a few badly needed features to help the bitt ranking of Top Stories from degrading terribly. Already I've noticed a few problems with large communities of newbies ranking the news.

Our stopgap "human-based" solution before we get to that point is for me and Vivy to ask you old hands and enthusiastic newbies to rank all the new news as soon as it appears. Encouraging many of you to rank bitts as soon as they appear is going to be a key feature of our solution.

And please, while really important news can stick around for longer, stuff that is older than 12 hours is probably crowding out important newer news.

One of the reasons why ranking is such a problem for us is that many newbies (and maybe some of the rest of you?) submit new bitts to categories and you do not bother to place them in Top Stories even when they deserve to be in Top Stories. Or, if they don't deserve to be there, then by all means: put them in the pool. That's important too.

Right now this is a "by hand" solution that we'll soon be adding technical solutions for, don't worry. Just please be patient and bear with us.

And if you've read this far, let me reward you by letting you know that we think the load balancing might be done tonight. No guarantees, but if the site is super-fast tomorrow, that'll be why.

--

Larry Sanger

Founder/CEO, Infobitt.com

[edp...@gmail.com]

I try to rank the new bitts, but it takes so long. Also, as soon as I drop a bitt into place, it disappears for a few seconds. This is disconcerting, and it makes me wonder if I've done something wrong.

Am I the only contributor having this problem?

In the old system deciding what rank to give a bit took longer than physically moving it into place. For me, in recent months, moving a bit takes far too much time. Should I send you a video?