jct progress @Saturday 270909

In meeting

• Decided to remove ‘upcoming’ from the submission process, based on feedback from user testing
• Find out if there is a module you can use to enable the users to sort the news by ‘most commented’ This will be a phase 2 endeavour
• The two column feed seems to work fine on front page – Matt needs to test it still works with our other selected sort method ‘recently popular’ once it gets on the live site and there is enough data to test with
• Team agreed that we try the tag cloud as a nav bar – Trending or Hot topics, like with Mixx. We will test this in the beta phase with users. Phase 2 we are considering setting categories (if we can work out how to do this) so we might look at trending topics and tags to define them and make them most relevant to our audience
• Need to remove ‘settings’ option from profile page, as it just allows the user to decide which categories they want to view – as we have hijacked the categories for news and opinion, this is not an option we want them to use.
• Need to remove ‘upcoming’ from the profile page navigation, as we won’t be having upcoming new, so it’s redundant
• Switch off the inbox totally through the admin panel – we can add it in later easily if we decide to reintroduce that system
• Team agreed to monitor and clean up titles of articles e.g. remove source categories like |News|Yahoo.com, as part of moderating activity
• Matt and I agreed to start a back up schedule – Matt will run the back up of the site on Tues and Thurs at 11pm and I’ll run it on Sunday at 11pm. I’ll also continue to run the repository transfer to live site on an as need basis
• The team all agreed that the Karma points seemed to be unclear and confusing, so we agreed to remove them for this first phase. We will look into the algorithm behind it to see if we could tweak it for phase 2. We couldn’t work out what ESP votes were so it was agreed to remove these at this point as well.

After meeting

• Set across a repository transfer to get the two column up online. Documented the process for an instruction sheet
• Removed dodgy users and their posts using ‘Kill Spam’ function. It seems to disable them but not take them out of the database. I suppose this will prevent them from signing up using the same log in details but it could clutter the database. Maybe research way to remove them?
• Try to set up automatic publishing by changing ‘votes to publish’ to 1 (as each new submitted article gets a vote of 1). Didn’t seem to work – articles still went to upcoming page. Tried it with 0 and still no win. Maybe research further
• Found out how to set the tag cloud text size in the admin panel configure/tags