Here we are, another Friday, another weekend looming ahead.
I think this has been a very productive week for sajha after a very long time. With controversial topics abound, which were not suitable for general consumption - smack on the home page, it was high time something had to be done.
As always, the combined sajha intelligence was there to provide good guidance to implement a path of least resistance to pave the way for a better surfing experience. The suggestion was to create a downvoting system to get some threads out of sajha not suitable to be on the homepage.
Upon creating such a system, I quickly realized that it is not fair for people who support such a thread hence the system was brewn to aggregate the sum total of downvote minus upvote to determine it's appearance on the homepage.
Having done this, there were few other notable side effects namely the "popular" and the "controversial" tabs. The Popular tab allows you to quickly access the popular posts calculated by sum total of positive responses minus the negative responses in descending order. The Controversial tab does the opposite ie sum total of negative responses minus the positive responses.
The reason for the controversial tab is because there are many issues in our society that are not deemed appropriate for public consumption, but it might be a good idea to put these things in the backburner for discussion so that sajha can welcome any kind of ideologies to be discussed in the main forefront or as determined by the votes perhaps in the controversial tab. This will ensure we are not turning down users whose views and ideas are simply different from the mainstream. However, general rules of common respect and ettiquette will still be applicable even on these controversial conversations. Let's keep it sajha for all those who respect each other.
With each great idea comes a slew of 'smart' users who try to abuse the
system, throwing a need to implement more secure framework. In this
case, I have seen few users with multiple (up to 7) usernames voting down on
threads to reach their objectives. Necessity is the mother of all
inventions and this necessitates me to create a system where I can flag
specific users down so they cannot vote for any threads because of their
abuse. It is coming soon to a browser near you.
Lastly but not the least, the new tabs! I am excited about the new tabs because it opens up a lot of new possibilities. Previous tabs were not that great because if you clicked on another tab and viewed a posting within that tab, then when you hit the back button, you went back to the kurakani tab no matter which tab you were viewing. But, with this new tab, you can be on whichever tab and your browser will remember that when you move around, so it will be easier to navigate the discussions easier than before. I am now thinking of implementing more tabs to accomodate more varying interests within the home page itself.
With these updates, I hope to keep all of you on the loop who care to know what's going on. Happy surfing, sharing and caring!
