Flood of new topics in Front Page category?

Isn’t it better to exclude Front Page from the All Categories view until after the import is completed? It’s going to screw up a lot of views. I think Discourse have this functionality.

Import is complete. We cannot import what does not exist, e.g. topics with no Disqus comments.

There seem to be some topics that are supposed to have comments. I scrolled down the front page, and the first post right now with comments has “8 comments” listed (QT3 movie podcast: Jason Bourne), but when I click on it, it gives me the option to “start discussion”, but that only takes me to a post with no comments.

I think the import is still going, not complete yet.

The import is, in fact, complete. We can only get one Disqus export per week, so it’s a few days old. Very recent Disqus replies were unavoidably lost in the process.

(Sorry, Disqus just won’t send data more than once a week.)

The colour of quoted text is white. Hard to read from the main page.

So, as I’ve noted, I’m a heavy user of the Latest view in Discourse, for whatever reason (hated it in vBulletin).

This view is continuously being flooded by these “Front Page” posts, despite the fact that I’m reasonably sure that @wumpus said they were done with the import. Moreover, the ones that keep showing up are neither genuinely new (often from years ago), nor do they have new comments in them (Replies still says zero). And I am very sure that some of them are ones that I saw on the Latest page before, like this Secret Agent Clank Review from 2008. I’m positive the Front Page category post about that was up top hours ago, yet here it is again, now, saying it’s 4m old!

Are these posts being continuously iterated over to check for new comments, or something? Because if so, they’re more or less going to destroy the Latest view in Discourse on this site.

When trying to read the Nemo Tom v Bruce, it was fine until the second page. Then I kept getting a page not loaded error (marketing anything or other) followed by a virus warning scam page. It happened a few times in that exact page. @wumpus. Not sure the best place to report this, sorry! This is on my Android phone, using Chrome.

It just depends how many zero Disqus comment front page articles there are. As Google, or random web visitors, load the page, that triggers the creation of a Discourse post for that blog entry.

There were no Disqus replies for these blog posts, so they did not appear in the import data.

I am not sure how many front page articles had zero Disqus comments, but that is the upper bound.

Why not exclude the whole Front Page category for about a week or two until these phantom topics settled in. When I had the integration between Blogger and Discourse, it took almost a week before the new topics stop coming in. And then, when someone else viewed the same topic in mobile, Blogger added a =m behind the URL and Discourse thinks it’s a new topic and started creating new threads again! Very annoying. I had to exclude the whole category from appearing.

Sure, it’s up to @tomchick. I think the shuffling in of the sad, lonely zero comment blog post topics might be mostly done over the weekend?

Whip up a script to open up everyone of qt3s articles, this getting this all out of the way. I foresee this going on for years as people stumble upon old posts via Google :p

I think their appearance in Latest/New, at this point, may be due to background tasks that are running to set the proper poster of the original article. There was a small hang up at first that assigned them all to Stusser. The task is reassigning them to Tom.

It seems like it’s pulling over images from the front page posts but maybe not embedded videos. And those are kind of important for context.

This is really, really annoying. Latest is my base view and the spam is horrendous and killing mobile usage.

If it continues through Monday we will take other steps. It just depends how many zero Disqus comment articles there are.

On the other hand, if you want to teach the controversy:

https://forum.quartertothree.com/c/front-page/l/top/all

You can mute the Front Page category while this is going on, and you won’t see it in the Latest view.

Nice to have integrated search, though:

It also really brings home to me just how much content there has been on this site over the years. Seeing all these old headlines come up over the last couple of days has been a good trip down memory lane.

It also shows how few articles have comments. @tomchick, you need to write more metacritic flamebait.

I’m excited about this as a way to draw me to the front page more often. I suspect it also will draw more of the community to comment on articles.