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  Should we make the landing page Q&A?

+ 3 like - 0 dislike
1362 views

I think most viewers are only reading posts on the landing page, not recent activity in Q&A page, because there is a striking contrast between the number of views per post on these two sections. I can't say for sure this correlation establishes a causation, but certainly it is an alert. Can we make the landing page "recent activity"? Let's try it if there's no harm.

asked Apr 7, 2014 in Feature Request by Jia Yiyang (2,640 points) [ revision history ]
recategorized Apr 7, 2014 by dimension10

Recent activity (="All Activity") would contain the meta posts to ... But what about setting the landing page to Q&A? In this list the edited posts do appear.
 

@Dilaton, I meant Q&A, "Recent activity in Q&A" is the title it shows when I click Q&A.

Indeed it is a bit confusing. I changed the title of this post.

Just a random thought, but I'm wondering if it might actually be quite reasonable to have meta posts on the main page, as long as they're clearly marked. (E.g. slightly greyed out so that Q&A questions stand out more.) On Stack Exchange sites the policies all get made by the small minority of users who are obsessed with the meta site. Having meta questions appear on the main page would mean everyone sees them, so it might actually make it a lot more democratic.

@Nathaniel exactly this is why I personally would not mind meta stuff (which should be outnumbered 1:10 say by incoming physics questions) appearing on the landing page too. This would prevent the formation of dangerous power driven political gangs right from the start ...

@Dilaton @Nathaniel While I agree with both of you, the plan is that meta will be shown on the main page, as soon as main outnumbers meta...  

1 Answer

+ 1 like - 0 dislike

I somewhat agree with this proposal...  

Note that the page would really be /activity/main, since we don't want to show meta posts on the main page.  

But we have to note this...  

My own modification of the proposal would be to have a new page type (only polarkernel can do this, I hope this isn't too difficult!) that contains 

  • Only main posts (in the Q&A section) 
  • Including questions, comments, and answers 
  • but not edits, including retagging and recategorisation too 

This page can be called "posts" and this could be made the main page. This has the advantage that the new questions won't be drowned either, yet you can bump posts by commenting, and all new posts (including comments) can be seen on the main page.  

But this may be quite difficult to make...   

But we would eventually need a main page, that in addition to the forementioned properties, also 

  • Shows featured questions, even if they are meta posts  
  • Shows new activity in reviews too but not paper imports   
answered Apr 7, 2014 by dimension10 (1,985 points) [ no revision ]
At present, I think the landing page could just set to Q&A and subtracting only meta but leaving the edits. On the current landing page, the latest post was active 16 h ago which makes us look like a ghost town. Displaying some activity on the landing page could do some good ...

@Dilaton Good idea. That means /activity/main. Have you alerted polarkernel yet?   

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