EotW Discussions :)
The removal of entry of the week has prompted some good discussion, like any change that is made to the site. In this entry I shall try to answer some of the issues raised in Reader Comments from the previous entry.
The notify list issue raised by InStitches was a bug and is now fixed 🙂
Many of you in the EotW discussions noted that we should ’email the author and ask if they minded’ being entry of the week, which adds nicely to the workload done either by myself or whoever volunteered for the task, which doesn’t seem particularly fair. It may seem like one e-mail but when the person doesn’t reply, or the message bounces because their public address is set up wrong (you’d be surprised!) etc, it all gets to be just a step too far towards a headache.
My thoughts, which I didn’t explain too clearly I suspect, were actually similar to how Katrina suggested. The ‘Vote For Me’ button would effectively become a way to nominate an entry for Entry of the Week. It would cut down the spam because the e-mail address on the other end of it would never be published. It would allow people to turn it off for their diary if they didn’t want to be ‘in the spotlight’. It would enable whoever chooses from the nominations the ability to press a single button in order to ‘set’ the entry for the week. And it could be set to ensure that one person one vote for the week, sort of… Maybe, on the last one, but its not that important anyway. But overall it would make it significantly easier for people to nominate, and significantly easier for the chooser to set as EotW.
Unfortunately, all of that I just wrote is going to take time to implement because it needs code changes and database additions. Not a huge deal to do, but time nonetheless. Given that it became Entry of the Month or Entry of the Six Weeks, I decided it was best to replace it with something else that did change a bit more often. Sooooo, what does all that mean? Well maybe Entry of the Week will return, but when it does the system will do a lot more to help us rather than it all being so manual and time consuming. Of course it’s still going to mean someone needs to read all the nominations though!
Katrina, it wasn’t even partially your fault – the help you gave was much appreciated and if I go ahead with the above thoughts then I’ll be more than happy for you to continue the choosing.
With regards to the Top Ten list, it was a software bug due to me stripping out the search engine hits from the equation that was causing the strange errors and meaning it wasn’t updating properly. It’s now fixed 🙂