Stirrdup.com
 

Hey guys, I put up my new site today and wondered what you guys thought of it.

http://www.stirrdup.com
Blogs and News that make people talk.

It is a community driven news site (similar to Digg and Reddit), but with a completely different - and better - promotion system. Basically we calculate just about everything that a user does with a particular story (clicking on the links...commenting, etc) and use those numbers to award points to a story. Once a story reaches a certain threshold it moves to the main page.

Since there is no real voting, we hope this will fix the "bury brigade" problem that plagues Digg and Reddit and will lead to more controversial and interesting stories making it to the main page. Points are based on interest in a story...not necessarily if a lot of people LIKE them.

When a story is in both the Hot and Stirring categories, the sorting is based on points, but weighed by time. So a story will slowly fall down the ranks unless it continually receives enough points to keep it near the top. This lets stories that are staying more popular stick near the top, but not stay there so long that it gets annoying.


That's the gist of the site, but I figured a few of you might be interested in a few of the changes we made.

1. Added a points and URL field to the thread table. The URL is where you go when you click on a thread title. To get to the normal SHOWTHREAD page you click the "5 comments" link that is under the description.
   
   
2. On the submit page used some Javascript to provide a preview of what the story will look like.
   
   
3. Used the subscription engine to provide a del.icio.us like save button that is completely AJAX based. Once you're logged in you can save and unsave a story from any page where it is listed (search results, etc). Right now the saved screen still sorts based on the latest comment, but we've added a timestamp field to the subscription table so that we'll eventually be able to offer it sorted by the time you saved it (like del.icio.us).
   
   
4. Made a few changes to the thread submit page that allows you to pass in the thread title and (in my case) url in the query string.
   
   
5. Hacked up the Top Posters add-on to keep track of who has gotten the most stories to the hot section.
   
   
6. Made a scheduled task that promotes stories from the stirring section to the hot section based on number of points. Runs every minute.
   
   
7. Used mod_rewrite to make a lot of the URLs shorter and more logical.

There is a bunch more, so please check it out and give me any feedback you may have. Thanks!

ok, edit... this is a vBulletin site...

99% transformed to something unrecognisable... so for me it is not a vbulletin board.. :)

Shows how flexible the underlying engine can be.

Very impressive.

Thanks a lot TMXS.

That is awesome vertigo jones, way more than a content change. That is really cool... I registered.

Awesome, thanks a lot fever. I'm really excited about it so far.

I really like this! Do you have other sites that you have built on vbulletin? Do you do custom work for hire?

Thanks Sanjay. No, I don't have any other sites that I have built on Vbulletin, but I've done some stuff in the past (that is no longer online).

And no, no custom work, but if I can figure out to work any of the stuff I've done into a default installation of VB, I'll be glad to release them as plugins.

Any other feedback?

Amazing! It's like digg.com combined with a free blogger site.

Wow, if you made this you could sell this for a lot.
Many people would LOVE that style. It's almost exactly like Digg.com!

wow i didnt think this was vbulletin at first look. great job

That's great, thanks guys.

Made a few changes which have increased the percentage of people who join. Pretty happy with it. Was looking for some new feedback and/or if anyone sees any issues in their particular browser.

It seems to be a really awesome site, especially with how it is powered by vBulletin behind it, and how it looks and works like Digg such sites but apparently doesn't use the same specialist software many of them use. The only thing that did annoy me from a semi usability point is that the news links go off site rather than to a mini submission on the site with some information and the links to the content.

Other than that it was great.

Thanks a bunch cheat-master30.

Yea, I was really impressed how little vb needed to be changed to make something like this possible. Other than the template edits, there were were only about 10-11 plug-ins written (or used from here) to make the whole thing happen. And half of those were duplicating existing functionality on pages where vb doesn't normally have it.

As far as your usability concern. One of the goals of the site is to organize existing content and make it simple to get to. We're trying to stay out of the way of the user as much as we can. The closest correlation I can think of would be a search engine. If search engine results took you to an intermediate page every time you wanted to read something you found on it, you'd get annoyed pretty quickly. It might be nice the first few times, but eventually you'd probably go find Google. :)

Thanks a ton for the feedback.

Oh, okay. Just how it seems very Digg like and that seems to be how Digg works. But since you said how it works more like a search engine in that respect, I'll drop that minor criticism as the rest of it seems awesome!

I appreciate your support, cheat. :)

We've changed things up a bit over there and grown significantly. Any other opinions? Worth a lot to us right now. :)

I'm no good at proper reviews but I will say It's a very impressive looking site :)

Thanks Kinneas!

We added a new feature to the site today, the ability to browse all of a users submittted stories (threads in vB terms) as well as their non-thread starting comments. You can see an example here: http://stirrdup.com/member.php?u=5 It uses the threadbit template to display everything and has full paging, so I could conceivably throw this together as a hack if anyone else is interested in this functionality for their forums?

It's lacking things like checking for permissions from private forums since we don't have anything like that, but I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult to hack in if needed.