I'll just bump this, because I feel it needs to be discussed farther.

EDIT: Bug mentioned before has been fixed.

BUMP! It was almost off the front of this section of the forums!

i continue to have concerns. it seems like people have been unwittingly unsharing and then resharing projects. nearly half of the front page is populated by projects that were on the front page long ago or projects that have been on the front page for more than a week. furthermore, it is nearly impossible to get a project on top loved because the lowest amount of love-its on a project that is front paged right now is 95. this means it is almost impossible for any user that isn't already famous to get a single project front paged. this is a hguge problem. don't say i didnt warn anyone, because I did in the very first post here, but people seemed to ignore it.

Wes64 wrote:

because any project that gains enough love-its in a week can get on the top-loved section, regardless of age, this poses a problem. it seems like extremely popular projects will begin to dominate the front page. it will also make popular people exponentially more popular.

i liked the old site because it held fame in moderation - maybe you got a ton of views after you uploaded, but then the views slowly petered out. although this is bad for people who are not already popular - maybe their projects faded away after a time - i liked it because nobody could rise to a position of unrivaled fame where the views just kept coming and coming.

although i dont know if what i am saying will occur, it seems like a bad idea to allow certain users and projects to become essentially aristocratic.

Good idea!

We certainly don't want to see the front page being monopolized by a small subset of the total population - so we have to fix this, if that's what's happening.

I don't believe the current logic allows any project to get frontpage “regardless of age” - it's been extended from the old limit of 10 days to a new limit of 60 days. It's also been changed so it ranks projects that meet that critera based on the loveits received in the last week, not for all time. However, I think you may be right that resharing a project currently “resets the clock” and allows somebody to bypass the restriction - I consider that a bug that we need to fix.

Paddle2See wrote:

We certainly don't want to see the front page being monopolized by a small subset of the total population - so we have to fix this, if that's what's happening.

I don't believe the current logic allows any project to get frontpage “regardless of age” - it's been extended from the old limit of 10 days to a new limit of 60 days. It's also been changed so it ranks projects that meet that critera based on the loveits received in the last week, not for all time. However, I think you may be right that resharing a project currently “resets the clock” and allows somebody to bypass the restriction - I consider that a bug that we need to fix.

what i mean by “regardless of age” is that you can reset the clock. thank you for responding!

Hmm, tone is getting rather shrill up there. Remember, Don't panic!

We're not going to ignore this. We're committed to making a homepage that's fair, and that showcases the broad range of talent in the Scratch community. We're also committed to fixing about 200 other glitches on the site right now.

But please don't think that this is easy. The homepage is incredibly tricky - it's dependent on a zillion factors. You tweak one and another becomes an issue.

Another thing to consider: The new model sets a timestamp as soon as as project hits one of the main homepage rows: loved, remixed, or featured. Once 7 days have passed from that timestamp, that project is no longer eligible for the homepage. But since this code has only been live for less than two weeks, not many projects have been marked in-eligable. So, a lot of projects that were already homepaged on the old site are eligible again. Once they fade away, things should settle a bit - but it might take some time.

Also - right now, any project shared in the last 6 months is eligible. We may set that to a lower value in the meantime, just to keep things fresh. The thinking behind the new threshold was that we want to encourage people to continue working on their projects to make them better. And setting a time limit from the first time you share it to 7 days in the future means that after 7 days, no matter what awesome changes / refinements you make to it, it'll never be eligible for the homepage again. That basically discourages investing more time in projects after 7 days have passed - which we think is probably bad. That said, this new model is more complex and harder to understand, which is also bad. You see - it's complex, there are many compromises, and it will take time to come up with a formula that works really well. Thanks for helping us think it through!

Nice to know we're getting some authoritative voice on the matter.

Well does anyone notice that many projects' Shared Date and Modify Date are messed up? As soon as the full release came out, old projects became popular again because it said they were shared May 9th. Even projects that were years old. Take Raphael for example. It says it was shared on the 14th May 2013. I don't think so! Scroll down to the bottom of the comments, and you can see some that are from 15th August 2012. Also, I remember it being featured on the old site. Sorry if this belongs on another topic, I just wanted to point it out because I think it has something to do with why old projects are on the front page.

You know how if a user has a project that is constantly on the front page that it is really difficult for them to get another project to appear on the front page instead (because only one project per user is allowed, and the most popular one will win out). Well, how about changing the algorithm that picks which of a user's projects to display (if there are more than one) to use the project that the user has marked as ‘featured’ on their profile page? That way the project that the user is currently pushing will be the one that is seen?

Fully support!