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Burdette Lamar
Burdette Lamar

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How to Point New Devs to Older Posts?

From what I can see, there is a huge waft of new Devs joining us every day.

I'd love to be able to point them (or some of them) to existing posts. I have a few posts describing gems I've put up over at RubyGems.org, which some may find useful.

I don't want to re-post, and I'm reluctant even to post a new link, because spam. (Note that I am not linking here.)

Any suggestions about getting through to the new people? Or do we just hope they find things on their own?

Top comments (9)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I've been mulling over a "bump" feature to re-feature old posts. @theoutlander was wondering the same thing recently.

The question is, is it a "bump" feature that you can use on your own posts or more of a "retweet-esque" feature that you can use but so can others. To spread stuff to others and also give old stuff new life if it's still relevant.

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

I liked the old “classic DEV” pots that would show up in your home feed! (I think that is what they were called)

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Ben Halpern

Yeah, we'll probably get those back in. We kind of quietly lost them without giving it as much thought when we made some other adjustments in the feed.

My personal paralysis on this is the concern of needing to be able to mark posts as out of date in some way.

If users had the ability to bump posts themselves, then at least they could update them and/or select stuff that's still timely.

To shave this yak further, I'd like to have more first class tools in general in terms of updating/versioning posts.

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

oh that would be really cool!

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

Another quick thought -- the maybe 100 infinity posts are probably pretty timeless, could just randomly throw some of those on the home page for people?

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Yeah, I actually think the concerns I mentioned above can be solved fairly simply.

This mostly fell to the wayside due to other priorities or fires lately.

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Dian Fay

The fact that there's a search bar at the top of every page makes me wonder just how much more is necessary. If someone wants to find posts on any particular topic, the tools are already there.

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Thomas Melville

I'd be thinking make it easy for them to find what they want. Search + refine by tags, most viewed/ liked.

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Vipul

That's what I've been thinking since I joined here recently. It'll be much better to have a button for new-comers that will list some top-rated posts from old time.