h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

To supplement the front and info pages, how about a Jump-off page? This would work from the assumption that much of the stuff that goes in to the guide is swallowed up - people don't become aware of it so they don't respond to it, so it's just a wasted effort.

Jumping off would be a random search with a variety of options:

* give me any [ten] at random
* give me [ten] conversations which have been started in the last [hour/day/...] and haven't been responded to
* give me a selection of conversations which have attracted contributions from more than [ten] people
* give me a selection of entries contributed by people who are currently online

There could be hundreds of combinations of options, some of them really weird (I'm sure we can come up with some of those!). It's a way of stirring the material to turn up those hidden gems.

I'd go with that. The current 'five most overlooked' could be incorporated into it too.

--
Talith (formerly Caroo)

Yes, I'd go with this one too. Must be loads of wierd stuff out there that we miss

FABT

Give me ten things at random which begin with N (thanks to Stanislav Lem).

And then, there would have to be a maximum improbability option, which would select entries by multiplying the time since anybody bothered to look at them by the time they have been available to look at.

But then... that would make it more probable that the things which haven't been looked at would be looked at more often... which would make it more probable that they wouldn't be selected next time.

The boring option - give me ten entries which the peer reviewers are most interested in.

The tantalising option - give me ten entries from people who have contravened the moderation rules most often.

H2G2 has a wonderfully flat folder structure - the URLs are refreshingly easy to construct.

If the life/universe/everything classification is retained (what do I mean, IF!?), then a Jump-off option should be added at each level - give me a SELECTION within this FOLDER LEVEL of what's going on/what has been submitted on Mondays/what's being ignored...

At the first level down, the membership counts for Life... topics are pitifully small (Sex 4, Families 28). Select Families and you get to the topic level with no membership counts. Select Sex and you get to a subfolder level with membership counts which are all greater than 4. Who decides on subfolder structure?

Is this sufficiently informative? Does it make it more likely that a visitor will pursue a topic which seems to be of interest to a tiny number of people when there are dozens clamouring for attention at the lower level?