On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 9:44 AM, Booksort <i...@booksort.com> wrote: > Why have you changed to label posts as eg '1 year ago'? >
This was made to provide a more relative format for when the note was submitted. As notes get older it is less and less important to know exactly when a user note was submitted and 1 day ago vs. 1 month ago vs. 1 year ago makes it easier to have a broader perspective on how old a user contributed note may be. I've found that in most cases older notes have a much lower probability for relevant information even though we still have a few very old notes that seem somewhat useful. > When reading User Contributed Notes and code suggestions on the site, it > is often essential to know exactly what order they were written in. This is > now impossible. Not at all. Knowing the exact time a note was submitted is still very much possible as the formatted date/time stamp is provided on-mouse-over (hovering over the relative date div). It's just become less obvious. Knowing when a note was submitted should not be as valuable as the content of that note. What most users want is useful information (not metadata). > Especially when it seems the order of display can be voted for! > This seems like dumbing-down in the extreme, to cater for people who can't > work out in their heads that 17th January 2012 is a year ago. > There are over 26K user notes on php.net and some of them dating as far back as 1999. There are also some documentation pages that contain over 100 notes. Sorting all notes by their date would mean that as the contribution of notes for that page grows the likely-hood that anyone will read older notes decreases substantially. The new system allows every note a fair shot at exposure (as fair as possible the current setup). The most current notes always go to the top for a certain period of time until they have gotten some exposure and then eventually when they do not receive a rating they are dropped to a lower priority and outweighed by notes of a higher rating. The system is designed to be as fair as possible so that when the majority of our users agree that a certain note is more useful to them than other notes it will rise to the top of the page. Obviously this system is very new and requires tweaking over time, but we ask that you be patient and give it a chance to do its job. User notes are as old as php.net itself and they have not received much change since inception. I understand and appreciate your feedback on this matter and I empathize with your dislike for change. I will do my best to meet everyone's demands while making sure the site doesn't break due to these changes. > > Please count this as a vote against it! > Ian > > -- > PHP Webmaster List Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > >
