Timeline for The future of Community Promotion, Open Source, and Hot Network Questions Ads
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
22 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 28, 2021 at 12:08 | comment | added | JNat StaffMod | You're attributing some of my comments about the new system to the old one, and vice-versa, @E.P. — I dunno that I can clarify stuff any more at this point, short of repeating myself. | |
| Jun 25, 2021 at 10:31 | comment | added | E.P. | Seriously, it sounds like you have made a decision (for whatever reasons) and now you are just looking for ways to rationalize it ex post facto (leading to the long stack of increasingly-implausible justifications). Please reconsider. | |
| Jun 25, 2021 at 10:24 | comment | added | E.P. | @JNat I thought that was why the rotation was refreshed every year. (For time-limited posts answers can simply be deleted.) Are there strong indications that the current one-year rotation period is too long, and a large fraction of adverts is becoming obsolete before the rotation? Note also that the current stated plan (single submission season, then ads get locked in for a full year) also suffers from that precise same problem. | |
| Jun 22, 2021 at 15:03 | comment | added | JNat StaffMod | A new post ensures that the posts that make it past the score threshold are still relevant for the period in question, rather than us showing the same ads over and over again just because they got up to a score of 6 a year ago (or whatever). That being said, that's just how I'm thinking about it at a high-level right now, @E.P.; could be that we implement it in some other way when the time comes, after the trial. | |
| Jun 22, 2021 at 14:58 | comment | added | E.P. | @JNat Why would it require posting new threads every month? Why not just use the same threads (i.e. one thread per year) as their answers accumulate votes, detect which answers have make it over the 6-vote threshold, and queue those for manual vetting once a month? | |
| Jun 22, 2021 at 14:50 | comment | added | JNat StaffMod | There is no technical barrier, no, @E.P. — but doing this once a month creates overhead elsewhere, since it'd require me posting ad collection posts on all eligible sites once a month, manually... unless we automate it. (You may see where I'm going next, but...) This is why we're running a trial, and will then decide on how frequently these should be posted, and based on that also have reason to justify automating some bits that need automating. | |
| Jun 22, 2021 at 14:43 | comment | added | E.P. | @JNat Thanks for the reply. If I understand your answer correctly, there is no technical (as opposed to organizational) barrier to scheduling such a process once a month? (particularly given that the ongoing vetting likely represents a fraction of the load in the initial 'submission season' and that ads that are already running do not need to be re-vetted.) | |
| Jun 22, 2021 at 14:00 | comment | added | JNat StaffMod | The overhead I was referring to there, @E.P., was the fact that the Ad Ops team would need to be constantly monitoring the Meta posts to check for new ads being displayed under the old system. Like I mentioned, the code it uses is unmaintained, and it does not serve the ads as per the same system the rest of the ads get served network-wide. While all other ads are vetted by staff individually and manually, these weren't. The old system did not allow for a reasonable way for the Ad Ops team (or the Community Team) to vet what ads are being displayed on our sites. | |
| Jun 22, 2021 at 13:48 | comment | added | E.P. | @JNat (cont'd from here) to clarify -- the questions in this post (what kind of overhead is this? Are they vetted by humans? Is it an automated process?) remain unanswered. This makes it very hard to propose alternatives that meet the community needs and the development realities half-way. So for now our only option is to continue to point out the places where the loss of value occurs as they crop up. | |
| Jun 17, 2021 at 14:54 | comment | added | barbara beeton | Some sites (here I represent tex.sx) have posted community ads to announce conferences or other special events. Limiting posting to January effectively prevents this practice as the timing does not mesh with the requirementss of the organizers. And the delay this year has already caused a number of relevant deadlines to be missed. (And it was highly embarrassing yesterday to see an announcement for a conference that took place last August.) | |
| May 21, 2021 at 13:32 | comment | added | doppelgreener | That's a relief! Thank you. | |
| May 21, 2021 at 13:23 | comment | added | JNat StaffMod | We are starting with a 6 month period, @doppelgreener :) I wrote: "Since we're approaching the middle of the year, we thought running a trial through the end of 2021 might be appropriate." I know I also mention something about a yearly rotation in the post, but that's not because of some model we use for enterprise costumers, just me using the yearly rotation we currently do for Community Promotion Ads as a baseline. But as I mention multiple times in the post, we can always adjust depending on the trial :) | |
| May 21, 2021 at 12:50 | comment | added | doppelgreener | @JNat I second that community ads can't work very well if we have only one month to submit them and eleven months to display them. In the model we've had until now, we could create new ads as things became relevant, and we could downvote ads out of the rotation if problems came up. You're taking a model that works well for enterprise customers and requiring ordinary communities to operate with it, and ... that doesn't work so well for us. Context may come up in our community that entirely fades from relevance by the time the next year rolls around. Can we start with six months tops instead? | |
| May 18, 2021 at 18:35 | comment | added | Rob | @Catija I don't oppose Feb/Mar but if this answer gets enough votes, and quarterly submissions are approved, we still have a start 3 months before Feb/Mar; which would be Nov 1 / Dec 1, where 3 months later is Feb 1 / Mar 1 - so your comment seems to propose no change or 2 weeks earlier than my comment - if this answer is approved. | |
| May 18, 2021 at 18:28 | comment | added | Catija StaffMod | @Rob Honestly, I'd rather avoid the (relatively quiet) December season for this (personally)... I think it'd be better overall to move away from the January timeline and look at running these, say, starting in February or March or whenever makes sense for user activity levels. :) | |
| May 18, 2021 at 18:25 | comment | added | Rob |
@JNat This is close enough to the answer that I was going to write that I'll comment here. "We're proposing a single "submission season" at the beginning of the year, that runs for 1 month across all the sites where the initiative is run, .." - Could we start Nov. 15th and run for 6 weeks, with a 'Staff approval' made within the first week of a quarter? That allows the infrequently visited child-metas to accumulate enough votes and for the Community AD to run for an extra few weeks (rather than vote a month, wait a month); it also allows complaints, suggestions, even Flags to improve the AD.
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| May 18, 2021 at 17:35 | history | edited | E.P. | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 332 characters in body
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| May 18, 2021 at 17:33 | comment | added | E.P. | @JNat That got lost in the sea of text. I think there's definitely a need for faster add-in than once a year. For one thing, if low engagement is already a problem, forcing communities to vote within one month or miss the bus is only going to exacerbate it. | |
| May 18, 2021 at 17:31 | comment | added | E.P. | @LShaver Yes, that was the idea -- it was implicit and should've been explicit, I guess. | |
| May 18, 2021 at 15:54 | comment | added | JNat StaffMod | I did say "though assuming all goes well, we can start doing these on an annual basis, and adjust if there's a call for a faster rotation of ads." (with highlight added here) So I do recognize the downsides of have a "snapshot" of the ads, rather than a dynamically generated pool of ads to draw from. | |
| May 18, 2021 at 15:54 | comment | added | LShaver | How about one post per year, that is reviewed quarterly to see if any new ads have gotten six votes? I'm also concerned about smaller sites that might have trouble getting to 6 votes. These are the sites that arguably need the most promotion. | |
| May 18, 2021 at 15:42 | history | answered | E.P. | CC BY-SA 4.0 |