I am pleased to announce the release of over a dozen new improvements to the Propeller.com homepage, and to confirm an upcoming release. Before I get into the details, I wanted to address the site failures and 404s that have been reported by our community over the past week. We have been running Propeller on the same set of database servers since we launched, and some of them are growing old in the teeth. Because of this, updates such as new story postings, comments and even props are taking longer, in some cases much longer, to appear on the site when viewed from one of the ailing machines.

We apologize for the bad user experience, and we are attacking the problem by ordering new database servers to replace the existing set. We are also optimizing our code to be less of a burden on the database. We hope to have Propeller back to normal very soon, and we thank the Propeller community for being patient with us while we fix things.

Now, onto the new stuff! This release was inspired by feedback we have received from the Propeller community, and by user testing we performed in December. Some of the updates make the site look and work more like the older Propeller site did, previous to the Propeller 2.0 launch. Some of the assumptions we made going into the Propeller 2.0 release led to features that did not have the positive impact we had hoped, and many of the Propeller community asked for them to be removed. We listened.

The first thing you will likely notice is the number of votes next to each story post, instead of the 1-10 score that we launched with as part of Propeller 2.0. We thought the 1-10 score would be easier to understand, you corrected us. You can now retract a vote you made accidentally, and you can now "Drop" a story. Somewhat akin to the "Sink" feature from the original Propeller site, the "Drop" is a way of down voting a story that we hope will help us separate the chaff from the wheat of the day's news. Dropping a story is easy, just click the "Drop It" (or in some cases, "Drop"). Unlike the old sink feature, the Drop feature actually affects the ranking. When the number of drops exceeds a certain threshold, the story will no longer appear on the homepage, or on any other story listing.


We have removed the community module from the middle of the story list. We did not do a great job of keeping it up to date, and the display was confusing to some. We have also replaced the "This Just In" module, which tended to get clogged with spam, with 2 great new modules we hope the community will enjoy. One is called "Most Commented Stories," and will show the new stories generating the most discussion on the site. The other is called "What People Are Saying," which will show highly rated comments recently posted. With these 2 modules, we hope that the great conversations taking place on Propeller will be obvious to those passing by the homepage, and will bring them into the discussion.

We are also introducing a new, queue-based algorithm to promote stories to the homepage. We are hoping this will surface a wider variety of posts, especially those that were previously unable to gain enough momentum to hit the big time. Here's how the new system works. Several times an hour, the algorithm will remove stories that are more than a day old or have accumulated a certain number of down votes. Those stories will be replaced with the top-ranked stories not yet on the page. The new algorithm will also ensure at least one new story each time it runs-meaning that sometimes, it will remove stories less than a day old, in the interest of varying the content. In short, we are creating a faster refresh rate for the home page.

We are also adding a new option: if you select the "This Week" button, you will see the most popular stories from the last seven days on the home page. For those that visit the site infrequently, the weekly view may end up being more popular than the "Now" view--which is just fine by us. And for Propeller members who would sooner avoid these newfangled developments, there is the "Today" option, which displays the page according to the older, slower-refreshing algorithm.

A number of visual improvements are included in this release as well. We have reduced the font weight for much of the homepage, increased the size of the search box, and changed "Got a Story" to "Submit a Story," to keep the semantics the same as the "Submit" tab. We also converted the profile links to a vertical list, added your avatar to the right, and added a new message count indicator.


And for those that read all the way down to the footer, you will notice that we are now displaying the latest posts from RSS feeds of several news sources, on the homepage and on many of the category pages. For fans of more news, all the time, enjoy!

That's all for this release, but not to worry -- we have lots more coming soon. Our next release will contain a Share This Story feature, which has been heavily requested. Thanks to all of you for your feedback -- without you, this release would not have been possible.

Happy Propping (and Dropping),
Tom