zachholman's Comments

Depends on how many tutorials have come after it. If it's a slow weekend, for example, some times some tutorials will tend to stay on the front page longer. I'm not sold on making a front page a la reddit right now.

Yes; I do monitor tutorials to check that there's nothing funky going on in the ratings. (You'd be surprised; there's a lot less "I'm going to rate down everybody" compared to the whole "I'm going to make a lot of accounts and rate mine up". Besides, rating down other people has no bearing on whether your own tutorial will be rated up). The only thing I noticed about your last tutorial submitted was that you seem to have given it a number of 5's.

But yes, overall it is something that I look out for, and I've been adding to those lines of defense more and more to hopefully move closer to a more robust system.

Pepper- try it again now; you had a bad bit of data that was mucking things up.

Haven't looked into it specifically or anything, but I'd suspect your inclination is correct: the majority are novices. What's more than that, there's probably a decent amount who have no real plan to substantially learn about a topic; they might be the type who come to learn about a specific effect, for example. So it's definitely a varied audience who come to the site.

The mention regarding beginner tutorials is a good one, Pegaweb. Again, it's also something I've had to "battle" for years. If you make things too beginner-focused, the advanced users cry foul and say that the quality of accepted tutorials goes down since, from their perspective, they're seeing less and less tutorials directly applicable to them. Same goes for beginners: a walkthrough that deals with broader, more advanced topics rather than mundane step-by-step basic instructions is way over their head and it can become a point of frustration. Trying to maintain a fine balance between those two extremes is difficult, and nearly exclusively means making someone unhappy: either the advanced visitors, the basic visitors, or the tutorial authors themselves.

I was speaking more towards the sudden influx of ratings for this tutorial with a clear pattern of ratings.

Oh, and that specific problem of "tutorial x got in but y didn't" is a problem I've literally had to deal with for seven years, even when I manually approved each and every one. It'll never get solved, really; just have to do our best to minimize it as much as possible.

Ironically enough, this might've made it to the front page had you legitimately gone through the submission process.

Thanks for pointing that out, hello123456.

Scaling a website like Good-Tutorials is hard. A few years ago I could suitably handle the amount of submissions myself, which tended to keep the average level of tutorials fairly high. At this point, however, we need to rely more on getting more eyeballs in the upcoming queue to help moderate tutorials.

More generally, the moderation process is something that I'm always looking to constantly tweak and improve upon. We've already changed the process a lot from its initial launch, so I think we're heading in the right direction. I do have some ideas to help improve things substantially as well, but as always it's tough to find the time to actually sit down and implement them. Along those same lines, I've been incredibly busy the last month in particular, which means I don't spend as much time in the moderation queue myself, which in turn does harm the overall process a bit.

Overall, though, if you have any specific comments or questions or feedback about how it might be improved, I'm always all ears. And if you or anyone else is interested in help moderating tutorials, just drop me a line and we'll see if you're a good fit.