((There's a Tl;Dr at the bottom of the page))  

What functionality is missing? What is unsatisfying with the current situation?

The Discover pages are a mess, especially the Article page. (Aside from the issue of my articles not appearing, regardless of creation date, activity, like count, view count, WIP status). I've noticed that 'Newly Published Articles' only appear on the page for a handful of hours, before falling off the edge and are never seen again. There are just THAT MANY articles that are created all the time.

Other issues include the Like section and view section being very similar to each other, which creates a negative feedback loop, propelling these articles ever further into the stratosphere and leaving others behind.

The last issue is that the Articles page is hidden behind the "Discover" menu, a lot of user claim other users don't even know it exists, and others are saying that all that matters is Discord (with others ammending that statement to add twitter and reddit).

 

How does this feature request address the current situation?

Article Exposure on World Anvil itself is a problem, period. We need to fix that. I prepared a large image to showcase a slight revamp on the article page that I think would go a long way to getting articles seen that users want seen. I will type out the notes below the image in case the text isn't clear enough.

Have a separete featured codex article and a separate featured article

Have a separate section for Codex articles and User made articles. This way, a Codex article can always be seen, and an article made by the community can always be seen.

The link to see all Daily featured articles should go to a Codex article that lists every Featured article by the day it was featured, separated by headers for month and year. Update at same time as Feature article update.

I just have it shown as a small link under the featured article, but I'm no UI expert. It could maybe be added somewhere else.

Keep Most Liked Articles, Remove most Viewed Articles

Most Viewed Articles is redundant and often reflects the most liked articles anyways. It creates a negative like-view feedback loop and isn't fair to lesser known or newer WA users.

The Most Liked list is still useful as it shows what the community liked the most over a period of time, whether it was seven or three days.

Criteria that determines most liked articles should be made public and stay consistent, whether it is creation date or update date or activity level, and whether it is for three days or seven days or something else.

Like counts and date of creation or activity are all that should count here and all that should be pulled by the algorithm for this list. WA users shouldn't be penalized because, say, they aren't using the featured articles widget on their own world, so their articles will never show here. (Just an example, don't take that seriously!)

Articles should always be removed after the set time period, whether it's 3 days or 7 days, articles shouldn't stick there for any longer.

I'm neutral on whether it should include only new articles or any article that gets a lot of likes in a short period of time. I've heard that both is true, but article activity being a criteria seems like it is very exploitable.

New Feature!!! Community chooses their own articles to appear

WA Users decide what articles they want this page to show, regardless of creation date or like count.

Each WA User can select only one article, and must select a new one every seven days (from a drop down list on their dashboard or similar location). This keeps users engaged, but also prevents tens of thousands of articles from showing from inactive users.

To prevent exploits, Articles canonly be selected once a month, or only once, period. Future exploits can be prevented by users simply ignoring articles they see too often.

The way articles are displayed here should be random, but it should display an article block for every single article that users want featured.

Criteria for an article appearing here must only involve what a user selects to showcase here. Like counts, view counts, words, comments, image header, etc. should not matter.

Replaces the Newly Published Articles" section, that rotates so often, no more than 3 people have a chance to see the article anyways. This new feature makes it so articles that WA users WANT TO BE SEEN are ALWAYS SEEN on site.

What are other uses for this feature request?

Additional ideas

Allow WA users to feature more than one article by spending Anvil Coins (500 coins?). Will quickly become unfair depending on price due to the disparity in the coins that each level recieves.

If allowing every user to showcase an article every seven days is too expensive server side, then have them spend Anvil coins to do this (like, 150 or so?) to cut down on the number of articles. This prevents tens of thousands of articles from new users from appearing but allows paying members to make sure they always get an article shown each week. HOWEVER, if this is done, there should still be a section for "newly published articles" so everyone has a chance to get their article seen, however little time that will be.

Have a section below the community featured articles that shows ten open feature suggestions at random and ten worlds at random, encouraging people to click on them. The issue is how hidden some of these things are on the site, so overlapping them between the pages makes it so they are seen more often.

If the Community Featured Articles section is still too large to show on one page after all the other limits, then allowing people to search them by article type (Generic, Item, Species, etc.) could be done, maybe even by having separate pages for each article type (but still only the ones users want features). Digging through hundreds of articles instead of millions should be possible?

Instead of just showing the featured article on the Dashboard page, show both the featured article, and the featured codex article, and below that, show 4 to 8 articles at random from the Community Featured Articles list. Still place emphasis on the featured article, but show the other articles in smaller blocks.

Instead of hiding challenge article entries only in the challenge article page itself, have a section on the Articles page that shows twelve challenge entries at random. Maybe even have a block on the dashboard below the Challenge banner that shows several completed challenge entries, similar to the point above.

Exploits and downsides

Might put a strain on the server? I'm no expert at this sort of thing.

Explaining to WA users how to get their article shown might be difficult, unless the feature is shown in plain view, such as having a button in the same location as the "Notify Followers", "Notify Discord", and "Add in Recent" buttons on the article edit page, or showing it in plain view on the dashbord.

If Anvil coins are used at all, it might give an unfair advantage to Sages, Deities, etc. who get quite a bit more coins than lower ranks, but that's also kind of the point to giving them more coins, right?

TL;DR

Articles Page needs a rework to both be more visible and make user's work more visible.

Most Liked and Most Viewed sections are redundant, and promoted a negative feedback loop, preventing new and less known users from getting their work seen.

Newly Published articles rotates out too quickly, preventing exposure to newer users.

Splitting featured articles between a user created article and a codex article ensures both are always seen and that a member of the community is always featured.

"Community Featured Articles" section ensures that the articles WA users WANT TO BE SEEN, are ALWAYS SEEN, with no exceptions.

Possibly adds in a new way to spend all those extra Anvil coins some of us have, but that's not a necessary feature.

Follow up

• -10

  by Michael Chandra
  on 2022-01-27 08:43

  Right now there are 4000 people online on Discord that aren't synced as paid subscribers, and several hundred Journeyfolk. There are over a million users on WA. Even if only 0.01% of those would try to get something discovered per day, it'd be 100 articles per day, thirty thousand per month. So as unfortunate as it is, you need some form of barrier to keep it even the slightest manageable.

• -300

  by A Lusty Dimensional Horror
  on 2022-01-26 03:48

  I don't necessarily disagree with everything you've said, nor do I think that the discovery part of WA is perfect. However, I think you should have selected a couple, major, actionable suggestions for voting on, rather than a long rant against the whole thing. There's far too much here to give a simple yay or nay to. Something to keep in mind if you do choose to discuss it again.   I appreciate the thought and effort you've put into this, but it easily could have been done in a tempered, focused way that would have enhanced your point. Instead, your tone and presentation are confrontational, wandering, and rude. Don't apologize for your opinion; consider apologizing for your presentation.   You, like everyone else, aren't entitled to have your work read. WA isn't obligated to direct people to your articles when, like you said, there are so many people making so much content. I really recommend turning to social media and taking things into your own hands if you want people visiting your work.

• +300

  by KajetanWrites
  on 2022-01-25 11:30

• -300

  by A Thundering Bananafolk
  on 2022-01-25 07:48

  From expirience, you may want to narrow the list down to one thing and only one thing. I keep making this mistake and it always backfires.   This is a rather large list here and while their are plenty of fine points, we need to look beyond the symptom and find the actual problem. We need more people reading, not new features.   No one is obligated to read any one person's work. That's how it should be. Every like, every comment, and every view is given freely. Even if all these features were implemented, the same articles would end up there from the same people.     These people have been around awhile, long enough to have a reputation. They've built a readership and it shows. I wager every one of us whose articles "reach the stratosphere," have sat exactly where your sitting at one point. We had to work our way up. It can take a while.   For this reason, I can't help but sympathize. This seems to have you very upset. I'm not sure what you expected, but then again, I know what it's like. You put so much time and dedication to this feature, my friend. It really shows how passionate you are about it. I'm not saying your right or wrong. I don't know the algorithm and even if I did I couldn't tell you how it works. I have no clue how that page works. I appear there often and while it doesn't do much in the way of exposure, I can easily see why it would bother someone.   What I can say is nothing here will work. Nothing here will solve the problem. Some of these points, while they may be valid, won't have the impact your looking for in practice. Others seem focused on dragging those who've climbed their way up back down when we should be finding a way to lift others up to the same level, if that makes sense.

• +100

  by ss2020
  on 2022-01-25 00:16

  Put a lot of effort into this. Yah, I just discovered it.

• -300

  by A Enfeebled Mimic
  on 2022-01-24 16:46

• +300

  by A Sneaky Bananafolk
  on 2022-01-24 15:34

• -300

  by A Glamorous Dryad
  on 2022-01-24 13:16

• +10

  by Naelin
  on 2022-01-24 13:04

  I am not entirely against the suggestion, though, much as with the worldember pledge rant thing, I think everyone would have a much better response to the core of it if it wasn't accompanied by the stream of ranting and confrontational negativity (and repeated mentions of "I will not talk about this issue again").
  I think the literally unapologetic tone, name-dropping, accusations of cheating/unfair advantage and insistence are what is getting people out of wanting to help you, not the ideas or opinions.   Your energy will be better spent on learning from others, instead of trying to figure out how to get above others.   I will try to divorce this from the rest in order to address the actual content of the request:

  ---

    -I think having a separate "item" to feature codex articles would be a neat idea to teach people to use the tools provided on the website. I fear, however, that the homepage is already very cluttered and that would kind of need to be accompanied by a cleanup of it.   -I find it interesting to compare most liked and most viewed in my personal profile, but I agree it's kind of redundant site-wide.   -I really like the idea of having x amount of random challenge entries shown on the Discovery->Articles page!   -The idea of using coins (or not) to list one of your articles to be rotated on a section randomly is simply not feasible, and would only turn what right now is one single person making a huge deal, into a thousand people complaining that their article hasn't shown for them.
  I have worked supporting a platform where people paid to have their stuff be shown and rotated with others and believe me, people will NOT be happy if they cannot 100% guarantee that it showed.   -The idea that "Newly Published articles rotates out too quickly" is in direct opposition with your suggestion: Making people able to submit their work to be promoted and randomly rotated will make it into an extremely fast rotation (WA has many people!) and coin usage will quickly limit that to guild members.
  The way you ENSURE that new users and people that are not in the community get a chance to be seen is by showing newly published articles in order, without filtering.   -The coin thing is 100% intentended: you support the website more, you get more opportunities for the website to support you. Especially for the mention of sages having an "unfair advantage": Sage is supposed to be the level in which you start to get monetization support, so it makes sense it also is the point in which it gets super easy to promote your work.   ---- Final thoughts:
  The people that are "at the top" of the likes and follows did not get there by trying to force the platform into showing them, with bot likes or secondary accounts. You will quickly find many of them are actually people that do a lot of sharing the work of others. Yes, I will not say that WA's discovery tools are good. I think they are not. But from your words everywhere else, I know that is not the point.
  Even if the Discovery section was perfect, that would not guarantee your work gets into a shortlist. Discovery is something to be reworked, but definitely not to this urgency.

• +100

  by ClarissaGosling
  on 2022-01-24 08:06

• -300

  by A Goodhearted Mlem
  on 2022-01-24 04:06

• -300

  by A Adorable Mlem
  on 2022-01-24 03:49

• -300

  by Oneriwien
  on 2022-01-24 01:14

  Kinda wish this page just didn't exist. I think that would be a better goal.

• -100

  by A Goodhearted Goblin
  on 2022-01-24 00:37

  Other users are right, I did not know this page existed, untill you started ranting on discord.
  I do agree that the whole discovery side of WA needs some work and the number of users and articles has outgrown its design. But I don't think your suggestions will help in that.
  I'm also not sure why you are sharing the amounts of coins different ranks get for logging in? People who pay more get more, soo??

• -300

  by SoulLink
  on 2022-01-23 22:02

  World Anvil currently does not offer any real features to get your work out there. If you want to find an audience for your stuff you need to use social media platforms.   I do not believe that your suggestion would improve this situation in any way. Furthermore you can already basically showcase one of your works once a week without a problem in the Global User Stream (which costs coins as well).   A real solution will involve the creation of a catalogue interface, proper categories, recommendations and more.

• +10

  by A Beloved Dragon
  on 2022-01-23 21:33

• +100

  by Shadow Malachi
  on 2022-01-23 21:02

  it is a very detailed and well thought out suggestion

• +50

  by TheDoctor292
  on 2022-01-23 20:46

• +50

  by Velociryx
  on 2022-01-23 20:22

• +300

  by Chrispy_0
  on 2022-01-23 20:07