(Locked) New Homepage "New Items" System

Love the idea and improvement.

collis said
As many of you know, our homepage has long been a contentious issue when it comes to authors dominating the new items list. Most recently the issue has come up on GraphicRiver as we’re starting to bring in more and more vectors and at times they’ve taken over the homepage. The community has asked for this issue to be addressed, so as soon as we had some time after PhotoDune, the dev team began doing some research into a fix.

Now at this point, I should mention what I always say about the homepage … it’s way more complicated than you might think This is because there is a lot of caching and a lot of items flowing through and a LOT of traffic. It’s one of those things that sounds easy when you describe a solution, but in practice is hard. So keep that in mind.

How the Homepage Currently Works

We show the most recent 40 items randomly shuffled on the homepage, and refreshed every 15 minutes.

The New Homepage Rotation System

We pick the 40 most recent authors to have an item approved, and their most recent item is shown. And again this would update every 15 minutes.

If you clicked on a category, you’d then see the most recent items of the most recent forty authors for that category – so the same thing, just in a smaller pool.

The new system will be much fairer to authors in terms of exposure between authors, and for buyers will ensure that there is a real variety of stuff on the homepage. We’ll never have to worry about the homepage being flooded again! The drawback of course is that if you release a couple or more items close together, some of them will miss the homepage. That is a necessary consequence however to prevent flooding. We looked into having more than one item on the page from each author, but for a variety of technical reasons, it turns out to be actually a large amount more work, and not necessarily a better overall solution in my opinion.

We should be ready to roll this out next week, so I just wanted to give the community a heads up about the change! Hopefully this will see a lot of happy authors

Footnote: PhotoDune actually only shows 28 items due to the proportions of the thumbnails, so just a note that it’s all going to be the same, but with 28 instead of 40.

Hey folks, I’m going to unsticky this thread now that it’s been a little while and everything seems to be working as expected.

Glad everyone is happy with the changes, and thanks to Mark for his hard work on this one!!

Great one.. thanks

wth… it’s a 9 month old thread… looking for some attention, are we?

digitalimpact said
wth… it’s a 9 month old thread… looking for some attention, are we?

but didn’t you noticed the new change? its so amazingly awesome

Watch out, we got a archaeologist over here

digitalimpact said
wth… it’s a 9 month old thread… looking for some attention, are we?

Still pretty new – in Envato-time-measurement…

^ That was pretty funny Xaver! I really laughed at my workspace.