Recycling front page content

[Jonesy23]

Can someone please clarify if news articles on the front page are getting bumped up to the top because they've actually been revised or updated, because the front page layout is so poor that the only way to keep stuff visible on it is to cycle it manually, or because a lack of available content means it needs bumping to make it look like more is being produced than actually exists?

Sorry if this comes across as snarky - actually, that's deliberate - but it becomes really annoying after a while clicking on something 'new' with today's date and finding I'd read it days ago. And maybe on another day too.

Other sites manage to achieve content management with a waterfall layout and updates to stories while still managing to avoid the niggly little problem of just pushing old stuff back to the top.

If it's about promoting midweek content to the weekend audience the usual trick is to promote as 'this weeks highlights' or 'you might have missed' not pretend it's new.

[anonymous-user]

My front pages has the news articles with a date next to the title, so you know when it was published. Are you actually talking about the 'What's new' button?

[Jonesy23]

In the 'Latest News' it has the dates but as an example I have this sneaking suspicion (OK - I know 100%) that the Audi R8 RWS and F50 articles weren't published on Saturday like they say but are actually recycled from earlier in the week.

Edited by Jonesy23 on Saturday 16th September 14:01

[fbc]

This has been going on for a while in my experience - the date on the article updates, but the actual article itself is the same as it was when it was originally published days earlier (the giveaway is the forum comments below the articles that pre-date the article itself). My presumption has been that typically it's caused by updated images being added and leading to a refresh of the date - so it's not really an issue of "recycled" content, rather minor updates. While not a major deal, it can be a bit annoying at time.