[Announcement] New Front Page Algorithm

scotty on 02/01/2019 - 22:12
Last edited 24/04/2019 - 15:04 by 1 other user

A new update has been rolled out this morning for the beta users (sign up on your settings page, if you are eligible) — New Front Page Algorithm. Basically, instead of "Grid" and "List" on the OzBargain front page, you are now also getting a button to switch to "New".

It displays the deals similarly to the list view, however,

  • Deals are ordered by internal score which is calculated from the popularity (votes) and freshness (how recent it has been posted), similar to Reddit & Hacker News. Internal score of individual deals might get altered by various factors.

  • Expired deals are automatically demoted.

  • More configuration options under settings -> deals, where you can

    • Promote / demote certain categories
    • Promote / demote certain stores

For example it is now possible to have a front page with more Travel and cashback related deals by

  • Change "Travel" category to "more"
  • Add cashrewards.com.au and shopback.com.au under "Store" and change them to "more"

Please give this beta feature a try, and leave feedback in comments.

Edit 10/4: Now available to all users.

Site Discussion

Comments

  • toristo on 02/01/2019 - 22:26
    +1

    Happy New Year @Scotty and the team. Love that you're still tinkering away making this a better community!

  • sss333 on 02/01/2019 - 22:31
    +2

    Changed front page to it and changed some settings, think I'll probably still end up mainly going to the new deals page.

  • [Deactivated] on 02/01/2019 - 22:52
    -4

    Eh.

  • Clear on 02/01/2019 - 22:59

    Since I'm in the market for some travel deals I made Travel the highest category and the rest lowest. Now the first 4 deals are travel, page 2 has 3 travel deals and then page 3 has heaps of travel related. Interesting to see how that's working.

  • knobbs on 02/01/2019 - 23:51

    Never going to beat the live page I'm on 24/7 at work or home

  • scotty on 10/04/2019 - 07:00
    +1

    Update: the New Front Page is now available to all logged in users. We have also added filtering for Title Tags / Title Flair. On the settings -> deals -> Front Page (New) section you can add / remove Title Tags and give different priority to them.

    Title Tags are declared in square-brackets at the beginning of the title. For example these current deals all started with [PC] in their title, and their title tag is "PC". If you do not wish to see deals title-tagged with PC on the front page, you can

    • Add "PC" to the list of tags
    • De-prioritise it to the minimum

    A deal can define multiple tags with comma-separated values. For example this deal is tagged with both NSW and ACT. So this deal will match if you are prioritising or de-prioritising either NSW or ACT.

    Matching both NSW and ACT

    Right now the default front page is still the old "listing deals with 25 or more votes in reverse chronological order" however we are considering moving this new front page to the default for guest users.

  • sween64 on 09/06/2019 - 07:49

    Some people put tags in round brackets, will these count towards the algorithm?

    • scotty on 09/06/2019 - 16:34
      +1

      No it won't work, and hopefully mods and power users will fix them up when they spot those.

      • sween64 on 10/06/2019 - 08:49

        Will there be some standardisation as well? Is it Xbox 1 or XB1? I believe the store names were standardised a long time ago…

  • sween64 on 09/06/2019 - 07:51

    Do tags that are two words count?

    • scotty on 09/06/2019 - 16:35
      +1

      Yes that is fine.

  • sween64 on 09/06/2019 - 07:54

    Great feature, I'm excited to use it!

  • robinCTS on 14/07/2019 - 21:07

    What about the following style for unrelated tags:

    [Pre-Order] [XB1]

    1. Will this count?

    2. Is this allowed, not allowed, a good idea, don't care?

      • Pros
        • Looks nicer
        • Easier/faster to identify as being separate tags, and what they are
      • Cons
        • Harder to manually edit out one of the tags?
        • One character longer

      -

    • scotty on 14/07/2019 - 21:20

      It will need to be

      [Pre-Order, XB1]

      Parser is also easier to write.

      • robinCTS on 14/07/2019 - 21:27

        OK. Thanks.

        What about [Pre-Order/XB1]?

        I hate that style and will change it to comma separated when I see it, but my question is - does the parser handle it?

        • scotty on 14/07/2019 - 21:29

          No. It takes whatever between [ and ] (up to 20 characters, at the beginning of the title), separate by comma, trim the white-space, etc. A forward slash like above wouldn't work.

  • bongom on 30/09/2019 - 16:11

    Is this working as designed as I'm seeing other state based deals at the top of the page https://www.ozbargain.com.au/?view=new

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