New Story Submitted... · 1:59am Feb 12th, 2016
...And it hasn't been approved for three hours.
Wait! Don't leave! I have my reasons for impatience! Don't think me otherwise!
Gotta cover my backside here.
So I've spent quite a bit of time paying attention to at what day of the week and at what time of day the website reaches peak users. This was because before I wrote pony.exe I needed views for my stories, like every viewer. From the way the front page is laid out and how the feature box works, I need to calculate the prime time to publish my story so it get approved at an appropriate time, getting the most amount of potential views before it gets booted down the front page.
Basically, I submit my story for approval at a peak time of user activity in the day. But, until my story is approved, it doesn't appear on the website, and my window of opportunity dwindles. Obviously I want to have my story approved at the time I wish it to be, but that all depends on the schedule of the story approvers.
So when none of them are online for long periods of time, there becomes a serious problem.
My story won't be the only one trying to get published. There's a queue, and the story approvers have to go through each and every one. I'm not sure if they have to in order exactly, but they must, otherwise they could skip a story for all of eternity and ignore it completely, and that would cause major problems. Anyways, when no story approvers are online, the queue builds, and when a story approver does go online they have a whole backlog of stories to get through.
And my story will be somewhere in the middle. And it will take a while for them to actually reach it. And there's no guarantee they'll actually get to it during the day. Maybe they'll approved it at seven o'clock in the morning. It's basically random. And that's terrible.
There should at least be a more reform system. Stories should appear on the front page not by a timed queue where they appear in order newest approved, but should be released on a uniform schedule, in order. There should always be a time where all newly approved stories are pumped out. Something like a cycle of 12:00 PM, then 3:00 PM, and then 6:00 PM, then 8:00 PM, with 12:00 AM being the cutoff point. That way, no stories are released at a shoddy time unless the author actually wishes it. And, when those stories are released, they will be released in order of approval, to keep the lime moving, just like the old model.
Basically, I have lots of problems with the front page and the featured box.
But that's an entirely different blog post.
Looking forward to it. It's all about chance sometimes, though. When I put up "The Reality I Choose," it sorta came and went in a day... and then suddenly it looked like everyone and his mom was reading it and it just blew up well over a day after it went up. Not just after I submitted it, but after it actually went up!
But regardless, I think with all the new stories that get put up on a regular basis, that'd probably result in a huge glut of stories in huge bursts. Just as likely to get lost in that shuffle as in the current system, perhaps.
Then again, what do I know about how this all works?