Stirrdup.com

[vertigo jones]

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!