Automatic Content Featuring With Criteria

[KensonPlays]

This is related to the latest HYS, I looked through the thread and it seems multiple people want this. If this is planned, feel free to comment, or close this thread.

XF 2.3 - Featuring content

While the first few 'Have you seen...?' posts for XenForo 2.3 have focused on mostly aesthetic or performance changes, today we are taking the opportunity to talk about one of the first new major pieces of functionality we've been working on. Every release cycle we like to focus on at least one...

xenforo.com

It would certainly be very nice to be able to define criteria (maybe per-node) to automatically Feature and Unfeature a thread or similar with the greatly expanded functionality. Some sample uses:

• Site Announcements - When an admin posts an announcement, automatically feature it for a week (or however long you choose), then unfeature it.
• Per board - If a topic becomes a "hot topic" based on whatever you define (X posts total, X posts in Y time), it could become Featured, either forever, or for a limited time.
  • You could have a hot thread, for example, of 10 posts within an hour or two, it could feature it for a day, a week, or forever.

Just imagine the possibilities of automation with Criteria combined with automatic featuring.

Edit: Please hit the Up arrow on the right to let people know of your interest. Not "like"!

Edit 2: Also check out @Alpha1's similar thread:

Automatic unfeaturing of content

XF2.3 will bring automatic featuring of content. Once it is featured it will be forever unless you manually unfeature it. I would like to suggest a few useful things to avoid a situation where you end up with a mass of featured content forever and that will give members more control over their...

xenforo.com

 

[Alpha1]

Yes, criteria such as views, recent views, replies, recent replies, reaction scores, author user group, author reaction points, word count, etc would be very useful to only get quality content featured.

We don't want a 5 word thread from a newbie, without replies and loads of negative reactions to be automatically featured.

Automatic featuring should not cause a lot of work or stress for moderators.

 

[Wildcat Media]

I like the idea of restricting featured content creation to specific usergroups or thread prefixes. I'm testing that now with search forums and it works really well. In essence, our own features need to be an article, need to have one of a handful of specific prefixes, and be posted by someone who is in our moderator or contributor secondary usergroups.

 

[Alpha1]

Automatically featuring content is something that fills a different needs than automatically trending content. And Featured Content also takes a much more prominent spot. Featured content is spotlighted and often placed in a widget at the top of the category page, as well as on the homepage and at the top of the main index of the content type. So if the content type is resources, then typically we would place a featured resources widget at the top of the main resource index.
Or if the content type is BLOG then we would have a Featured Blogs on the main Blog index, Certain Blog Categories, Homepage (Portal). We may also want to display Featured Blogs on Forum index for extra content discovery.

Featured Content is a matter of showcasing our best content in the nicest most prominent way. Best looking widget in the most prominent locations. Because we expect that users will want to explore this content because Featured Content has importance and quality. This importance and quality are very different from trending content, as Trending Content is current, engaging and sometimes even urgent.
Importance can be measured by various criteria. Things like views, replies, review ratings, reaction score, number of reactions, author usergroup, category give a good indication.

Automatic Featuring is by no means new. We had it for our big boards on vb3 and when we came to XF it was created for us and by very popular demand, various prominent addon developers added this to their addons as well. Now that Xf has added Featured Content widget, all of those are getting removed from addons and we have to do without the functionality until either xenforo or addon developers offer this for the core Featured Content Widgets.

 

[Jeremy P]

Featured content is spotlighted and often placed in a widget at the top of the category page, as well as on the homepage and at the top of the main index of the content type. So if the content type is resources, then typically we would place a featured resources widget at the top of the main resource index.

You can do this with the trending widget as well. You can, today, use the trending widget to display a list of the 5 most viewed/liked/reviewed (or some combination thereof) resources in a given time window on a resource overview or within a resource category, for example. The widget options and display styles are nearly identical to those for featured content too. You can even title the widget "featured resources" instead of "trending resources" if you really wanted, so I wouldn't get too hung up on the name of the systems.

I really do promise I'm not trying to be obtuse. I guess I'm just still not clear on how automatically featuring content with the most views/likes/replies provides meaningfully different content promotion/discovery than what is already available with the trending system, beyond it being what people were used to from add-ons which unified the two concepts.

Importance can be measured by various criteria. Things like views, replies, review ratings, reaction score, number of reactions, author usergroup, category give a good indication.

These metrics of importance are exactly what we use to calculate what is trending, and the window of time is configurable. It doesn't have to be as biased by recency as other trending algorithms you may be used to. Think more like Reddit, where you can sort by different metrics and over longer time windows. People often ask us to take inspiration from modern social media/news platforms, even if it provides a slightly different experience than what was available prior.

What do you want to do with the featured system that you cannot do with the featured or trending systems as they stand today, or what might you be able to do with a combined system but not separate systems?

 

[beerForo]

Use a Search Forum for the criteria you want and have the box ticked to automatically feature the content from that forum, hide it from the forum home, now it's simply serves as a qualifier for your Featured content.

 

[beerForo]

Never mind, Search Forums don't seem to have the Automatically feature threads setting. Thought that would have been a nice filter for them.

 

[Jeremy P]

The way search forums are architected doesn't lend itself to the way the automatic feature option works, unfortunately.

It's not that we couldn't add more comprehensive criteria to featured content though. It's that, right now, we remain hopeful that investing that time into improving trending content instead will pay off better for everyone. We're still listening to and engaging with those who think otherwise in good faith.

 

[beerForo]

That's fine I just thought I had a solution. I understand it's a search result so you can pick up featured threads and put them all on one forum, but you can't feature them the other way around.