Home page stories now require 4 votes

The number of votes required before a submission is sent to the front page of Sturvs has been increased to 4 (from 3). This is to guarantee a good quality of content making it to the home page. With the surge in traffic and submissions, we have to gradually raise the bar. The original plan was to increase the minimum to 5 votes, but we welt it would be better to make the increase gradual. We will increase it to 5 within the next few months. Hopefully we will one day have enough traffic to increase the minimum to 10 votes.

Please note that we Sturvs admins can push any submission they feel worthy to the home page even if it has 0 (zero) votes. Submissions can also be removed from the home page if we feel they aren’t going to be of interest to visitors (as satisfying visitors is our ultimate goal) or if the same user intentionally votes up more than 1 self-related item to the home page at a time. We want to encourage other people voting on user submissions and determining whether or not they make it to the home page. Once again we will just say that satisfying visitors is our #1 goal and the #1 purpose of this website, so we will definitely always do what we can to make sure our home page contains interesting content for our visitors.

So far, the number of votes a submission gets really is a measure of how much the submission is liked by our visitors. A look at the top submissions so far this year can be found on our Top Sturvs page and there is no doubt that Gongo Aso deserves to be the most voted-on item (ahead by a large margin).

One issue of concern is our frequent addition of content from major Nigerian sources (e.g. newspaper websites and Youtube) and how these push user submissions off the Latest Sturvs page. We will be conducting an experiment to see how much user content will be on the Latest Sturvs page and how often content will be submitted if we slow down our import rate or pause it altogether. Hopefully this will encourage users to submit articles if they know that their submissions will spend enough time on the Latest Sturvs page to be seen by others before falling off.

Right now the average amount of time a submission spends on the Latest Sturvs page is 8 hours and for the home page (Hot Sturvs) 4 days. In other words any submission that makes it to our home page gets 4 days of free advertising.