Open Help Thread #004 : Hone Your Skills by Helping Others Hone Theirs

Also, as I write this, you are featured.

Brian,

I had to take the original article down and republish it (per Aine's suggestion). Unbeknown to me, because I started the article in draft form yesterday at noon, when I published this morning at 9 a.m., it showed yesterday's date and time. Now that's a stupid set up (no offense programmer).

Also, it doesn't account for the previous 7 articles never making it to the box. Articles with high comment count and votes. At the same time, I was seeing articles with no comments and articles that had meta stuff in them in the featured block. One article situation that I documented with screen shots was an "article" that had 1 vote and no comments, asking people to sign a habeas corpus something or other. It sat at the top of the feature box for all of Saturday and Sunday. This was a month or so ago. I think some transparency on the subject would be welcomed by all.

It can be disheartening. I don't expect to be featured all the time. A lot of the articles I write are community building articles. But today's article mattered a lot to me.

Brian:

How's it look with the two of us in the block at once?

The bug you're mentioning is probably temporary: That reared its ugly head once before (ages ago) and was subsequently fixed. Something obviously happened to re-activate the issue, and I assume all will be well shortly.

For what it's worth, I'm thinking the Newsvine staff are busy this weekend (not ignoring you) because I received a response from Calvin stating that he'd have to take care of some other issues I've been emailing the staff about tomorrow, as he's away from a computer with only an iPhone for internet connectivity.

Brian, the "bug" as you call it, has been in place for well over a month.

I'm calling it a bug, because it's definitely not there intentionally, and my guess is that they haven't had a chance to fix it yet, for whatever reason.

I'm going to submit this whole thread as a bug report, and the best we can hope for is that they get to it.

While it sucks that it's been there for a month, it "is" affecting everyone, if its there -- so it's not just you. That may be little consolation, but again: It's been fixed once before and I think that they will probably fix it again shortly.

Brian,

Thanks for the information.

Brian:

That means the timestamp goes on the "Published Live" save only now, not an "Unpublished Draft" save?

I'm pretty sure that's correct.

Brian @ 6

This bug that you referred to - it was about the timestamp on a draft article as it published? That was the problem for me to day, but not in the past.

This is the first time I ever saved an article for more than a short while, because I was waiting for jfx to finish his half. I always publish within a half hour of starting an article on the Vine. I usually write it in wordpad in advance and put in all the html before I even paste anything to the article template on the Vine. Then it's just a matter of writing in the tags and uploading a graphic, and making sure that all the html works right.

I believe the bug that was fixed was as follows:

Saving an unpublished draft locked in the timestamp.

So, if I save a draft on Tuesday at 12:30 PM, but publish live on Wednesday at 1:30 PM, it was still timestamping the "published live" version with the Tuesday at 12:30 PM time, thus wrecking the articles shot at getting featured.

At this point (now that Mark has fixed it) you should be able to write an article today, save it as a draft, publish it live next year -- and the timestamp SHOULD reflect the date and time -next year- that you hit "publish live." Then, it would still get 24 hours of feauturability.

And I understand that.

How does that change the situation where I save an article and then publish it a half hour later? The time stamp is not the only thing affecting being featured in the writers' box, is my point.

I do not save articles for any length of time in draft mode. Only as long as it takes to get it set up on NV because it has been written on my hard drive, including the html and all links and to test it out prior to publishing..

Oh.

Gotcha.

So, you're having other problems, besides the one. I was confused about that.

Hrm.

The trouble is, even if asked point blank, I don't think they'd reveal anything too specific about the algorithm, due to gaming issues. I wish I could say otherwise, but I can't -- as I've asked about a few things I'd like to know more about and have gotten the stonewall.

Sorry, I'm not much help.

Brian @ 6.6

Your forthrightness is appreciated. Thanks.

As I said way up the thread, more transparency (from the powers that be) on the issue would be appreciated.

Are others having trouble with tracking or is it just me?

Scott:

Just you. Or maybe not.

Is this new news or old news?

I had the same frustrations, but a couple of days later I went back to Google Analytics and found that it had finally recognised my code and was spooling off statistics.

I've tried this for a couple weeks now and it's still not working for me. Tried emailing Newsvine about it... question: do they ever respond? I haven't heard back and it's been quite some time.

Well let me be the first to say thank god for newsvine's technical problems. I was gonna go out and relax tonite after a hard of sitting in a room learning how to be certified to distribute (legally anyway) medications in Maryland. But maybe I should instead read all the discussions here before Newsvine goes off-line again.

Naw...