blogs etc

One of the things I like about chess.com is the amount of user-generated content (forum discussions, articles, blogs, etc.) - which makes it valuable in training and improvement.

However, when it comes to blogs I think that it is really unfortunate that there is no filtering/browsing functionality. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I only see an option to sort by a) most recent b) no. comments c) no. reads/views...

However, this sorting is done by the total number of views/comments ever, which means it will always return those ancient blogs at the top (which were out there for a really long time and also had a larger initial number of views/reads because there were less blogs out there to read) - so such sorting is essentially useless.

If you already want to have a sorting based on reads/comments (or likes, if you ever introduce them to the system), it would be useful to have an option of let's say - sorting based on reads but only blogs posted this week (or this month (or today))

That way, quality blogs by those who are not "top-bloggers" would be more visible to other people who would in turn also be able to read more blogs that actually interest them, since there is also a lot of "spam" in the blog section - posts about religion, flowers and US presidents instead of chess...

I already suggested this before (though at a different part of the forum) - but have gotten nearly no feedback. Advanced topic-based filtering takes a lot of work, but this simple change (weekly/monthly/daily sorts) is certainly not difficult to implement and would significantly improve the blogging experience.

Once again, as I'm not a paying member, I am not making a demand here, this is merely a suggestion, but hopefuly one that is in everyones favor.

Well, the most recent sort will already encompass most of what you want. The first ones in the list will be today's (if there are any) followed by the ones that were posted this week then this month. So just going page by page will give you those automatically. No real reason to creat additional filters for that.

Huh?

You obviously misunderstood something.

Yes, if you go through the most recent ones, you get the - most recent ones (duh), but NOT the most recent good ones. As I said, there is a lot of spam and poor blogs, so some sort of filtering is still required.

I don't know if you're aware, but in all search engines (google, yahoo, etc.) - they did a research and the vast majority of people just look at the first, or maaaybe second page of search results... so no, something created three days ago is already not visible and gets no more reads/visits because people don't want to go to the forth page to look for it. Not to mention an entire month. So, if you sort the blogs from the last month or week by the number of reads/comments you will get an overview of the interesting posts during this period.

# of reads doesn't necessarily equate to a better blog. Potentially, the number of comments could mean it was more popular but it could be that the blog is receiving a lot of bad comments.

But I see what you are saying. Not sure how useful it would be to most people. The idea of rating each blog (likes in our post) would probably more useful for something like that.

Yes, I know that neither the number of reads or the number of comments are the best measures of popularity, likes would be a more direct approach, but would require more work from the staff, especially since all the existing blogs would be difficult to incorporate in the like-ranking system.

The daily/weekly/monthly number of comments/reads (disregarding self-comments and self-reads) would, however, be helpful.

The reason why some sort of filtering is required is that there is really a lot of spam-blogs. I mean, people posting rubish aren't doing anything illegal, certainly, it's within their rights to blog about anything they want - but most of that stuff is not of interest to other people.... and we who are reading the blogs would like to have a way of focusing on chess-related quality-written articles.

As I mentioned, the advantage is twofold - a) more fun to the readers and possibly more people that are reading (as it becomes easier to find something useful) b) more feedback to the bloggers and hence more motivation to write and post...

I mean, if I invest three hours in writing an article about some theoretical line (analysing, searching/selecting representative games, breaking up the analysis into individual boards for readability, etc.) - and then get 70 reads in two days and 1 comment that is hardly a motivation for me (or anyone else) to post (certainly, I get more reads now, but the numbers aren't really high). Of course, slowly you get people that subscribe to you, but at this pace - it takes a loooot of time - and in the meantime you get very little feedback.

Forums are functioning much better. There they are sorted automatically so that the ones with most recent comments get on top, so in a sense, topics that are discussed more are shown first - this is why one can get more feedback there... but forums aren't meant to be used for articles, rather for short questions and for showing single games.

I know that blogs aren't the most popular thing on this site, but there ARE very good articles out there and what we need is just a way to make them more visible. This what I have suggested is just the -simplest- possible solution, as it could be done within a single day if someone decided to make the change. Of course, there are also many better solutions, but they take more time and effort.

I completely agree with the OP.  There's right now no simple way to read new chess blogs other than to go to the "top bloggers" list which inevitably features the same dozen authors. The problem, as the OP notes, is also compounded by the large amount of spam (i.e., non-chess related material) one must wade through.

Perhaps a modest start of a solution would be to not automatically include blog entries in the official list of new blogs unless the author specifically requests it and understands that the content of the blog then needs to be at least tangentially related to chess?  That way people can still maintain their own personal blogs about toothpaste or ferrets or what not for their friends (or whomever they imagine read such drivel) without forcing their literary flotsam upon those who come here for chess.