This is the dev blog for Wire.vg, a social news site catering to gamers, trying to cut through the crap.
If you're looking for information on how to use the Wire.vg API, have a look here.
A long awaited feature has finally arrived; you now get notified when people reply to your comments! Never again will you need to worry about missing an important conversation.
You can also view all the times you have been replied to, as clicking “Replies” in the top right takes you to the cleverly named Replies page. Here you can select to see only unread replies, or all of them sorted by newest first.
A very small and not all that festive update for you: Site’s on Wire now have their icons (if they can be found) displayed on their subs. It’s just another way to make it easier for you to find what you want.
Minimal.wire.vg is a new page which simply shows you what the big news is today. It uses Wire’s trending topics function to generate the list, and a basic search to get the stories. Every hour or so it’ll be updated to reflect what the gaming blogosphere is talking about now.
A simple, fuss-less way to get today’s gaming news.
A feature long promised has now emerged from testing: Nested comments.
This means, simply, that you can now reply to specific comments, allowing for a branching conversation to exist. Without this, conversations are shattered and the resulting comment section is hard to follow and ultimately useless.
Once I’ve worked out a practical way to do it, you’ll soon also get notifications when people reply to your comments.
Another feature to now exist is the ability to edit your own comments. Though this is less because it’s finally ready, and more because I only just realised I didn’t enable it.
Not content with your Wire.vg times being set to your own timezone? Well, fear not my time-illiterate friend, for now there is an option to make all times show you not when, but how long ago.
Go into your profile (http://wire.vg/profile/) and select “Show dates and times relative to now (e.g. “six hours ago”)” to view these new times.
Little flames now appear on articles that contain a trending topic. The little icon appears out the way on the right for easy skim reading. The icon for comments has also moved to join it, allowing you to easily and quickly skim read down the right hand side for interesting things.
Oh, and pages now show 100 items, rather than the old 60.
On the Wire front page, clicking on the title of a post now goes to the actual post. Clicking the link which used to say “permalink” and now says something along the lines of “2 comments” now goes to the comments page.
This is the order that makes the most sense.
After a month or two of no updates, have one less feature.
The little thumbnails you see next to each post have been disabled. It may seem like a step backwards, but it’s part of an interesting and much larger shift swirling around the underbelly of Wire.
To help with scaling, a lot of code is being tweaked to run less like a clock and more like warm butter. Soon the front page will update more gradually. It’ll make the site feel more alive and dynamic, which at the same time leading to much less load on the fragile server.
Right now, posts get voted on. More votes means the post goes higher. Once it’s reached a set age, it disappears. That’s going to change.
Soon posts will start out in the middle of the page, go up when voted on, then slowly fall back down the page over time.
Think of each post as a hot air balloon with a rip in the top. Every vote gives it more hot air, but over time the rip gets bigger and it takes more and more to keep it up. Inevitably each balloon will sink.
The new system promotes new, voted on news to the top of the page much more effectively than the old one, hopefully giving you more new stuff to read.
To try out the new system, edit your chosen channel (try your Front Page) by clicking on the little wrench and choose “Gravity” from the Sort By menu.
It’s very new, so it’s still being tinkered with.
It’s based on the same rating algorithm Hacker News uses, detailed here.
Once everyone is happy that it’s working and we’ve made it run happily on the server, it will become the default ordering on the Front Page. So, if your Front Page is currently ordered by Most Votes, it’ll switch over to Gravity (not the best name, I know). You can change it back if you don’t like it, and if you’ve set your Front Page to be sorted by anything else, it won’t change.
If you do play around with it, be sure to tell everyone how you get on.
You can now, via your profile, choose not to see the Wire Bar when you browse to an external site.
If you tick the “Hide the Wire Bar along the top of the page on outgoing links” option you will simply be redirected to the article you’re wanting to read.
