Please turn off “Trending in Christmas” or at least make the red less BRIGHT!

[MAOU]

It’s November, not December!

The red is jarring!!

I’m not interested in what’s trending on the Christmas board.

It’s annoying.

It’s badly placed.

Please let us turn it off.

Photo might help 🙄

Hi folks, Sorry about all this. The Christmas overload in the right trending box was the result of an error (mine.). It should be back to normal now. We have a couple of ways "trending" gets built and I messed up one of them when making the other box (the red one.) Apologies for this. It should work as it did before now. If you spot that that's not the case let me know. We store page view counts from Google analytics locally in our DB and caches, and use them to build the trending lists. The Christmas / all threads lists weren't properly separated when I set up the red box, so there was a sort of race happening depending on in what order the scripts ran and whether you happened to load the page when one had run and not the other. The result could be that you'd see "all Christmas" threads in the regular box instead of "all threads." That would last for a few minutes at a time until the next run then the cycle would get repeated later. It should all be straightened out now. Apologies for all the confusion. I might fire myself.

Thank you for explaining @StevenTechMumsnet, everyone makes mistakes, that isn't the problem it's the fact that for days now you and @JustineMumsnet havent been prepared to accept that the users know what they are talking about when there is an issue

Erm I wasn't 'gaslighting' - I didn't know until today that this was what had happened.

@JustineMumsnet

Erm I wasn't 'gaslighting' - I didn't know until today that this was what had happened.

What's the point of a designated "site stuff" section for users to highlight issues if you don't pay any attention to them. And the BRIGHT RED BOX (cos that's how loud it is) is still glued to the comments box in most threads. And no, it's not green either

@JustineMumsnet

Erm I wasn't 'gaslighting' - I didn't know until today that this was what had happened.

Your users were telling you that something was happening, but were being told that wasn't the case.

With respect, you need to find out "what had happened" before you post a denial.
You must have been aware that Christmas threads weren't the real Trending threads onsite (if they were, you wouldn't be introducing the extra box), and a quick word with Tech would have pointed them towards what looks like a simple mistake and simple fix.

Fingers crossed that's it working better now. Will try to get screenshots if not. Thanks.

Sorry, @JustineMumsnet I clicked on the wrong name, my fault

I didn't deny there were more Christmas threads in trending DumplingsAndStew - I said that we hadn't made a deliberate decision to make all the trending threads be Christmas ones, which we hadn't. Given the introduction of the Christmas trending box and the additional traffic to the Christmas boards that this caused, plus some feedback that people were accidentally clicking on the Christmas trending box before we moved it, I assumed that the preponderance of threads in the trending box was down to that. I was unaware of the temporary miscoding glitch.

I took your saying there were an extra 10k clicks since the introduction of the Xmas box as an explanation for more Christmas threads genuinely being trending.

Apologies for the accusation.

@DumplingsAndStew

I took your saying there were an extra 10k clicks since the introduction of the Xmas box as an explanation for more Christmas threads genuinely being trending.

Apologies for the accusation.

no problem

It's still big red fucking annoying and unnecessary though
Sigh

the Christmas topic was our fourth busiest this week, behind only AIBU, Chat and relationships, with views up 42% from the previous week.... we could look at changing it from festive red to festive green if that feels less in your face?

I think it was fourth busiest because those were the only threads that came up in Trending, so that much more attention than usual was being drawn to it.

It would be interesting to see whether your assessment that MN users actually wanted Christmas threads still bears up now that they're not all over the Trending box.

@Platax

It would be interesting to see whether your assessment that MN users actually wanted Christmas threads still bears up now that they're not all over the Trending box.

I think this is what I found annoying about this whole exercise.

It’s a bit disingenuous to claim that there has been a big increase in clicks on the Christmas topic when for a few days one of the main navigation options for the site was literally full of Christmas threads which would never see the light of day otherwise. I imagine a lot of people were clicking on them not realising what they were then immediately clicking out of them.

So the increase in traffic for Christmas was in fact purposely driven by MN, albeit accidentally in one trending box.

It’s too bloody soon, can’t I just enjoy Autumn for a bit longer?

My posts always have errors that I have to correct. This is now taking much much longer and I have to go to preview multiple times,. I don't know if this has anything to do with the red banner slowing everything down.

I'm on a laptop and don't seem to have a trending box at all now. Never saw the awful Christmas one though.