BBC Website Most Shared / Most Read conspiracy?

[neilski]

Has anyone else noticed that quite regularly on the BBC website the most shared which then leads to the most read story is often months if not years old?

At the moment it's a story from 2007 about a woman living on beans on toast for a year to pay an £1800 vet bill for her chicken scratching its leg on some barbed wire when she could have dined out at KFC for months on that money. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/6960334.stm

An article that reappears most shared / most read regularly is the one about "Condoms too big for Indian men" which must be the most read story at least 3-4 times a year despite it being from 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/616169...

Is there some sort of secret underground movement that pick a random story every now and again and share it by email enough times for it to become most shared which due to the way the BBC News homepage is laid out usually becomes most read? Is anyone here in on the gag or is there some other explanation that I'm not seeing?

[jsc15]

Unless this is a 4chan gag, I think this is just a case of the British mentality of "if you see a queue, join it"

[zac510]

I've worked on a few of these on websites in my daily work and we always have to put a time limit on it, ie Most popular of last month or most popular of last 1 hour. This is basically so articles don't get 'stuck' up the top and new stuff cycles through into it. This means it only counts web hits that occured in the last 1 hour, anything older is ignored.

In the BBC's case they don't disclose the timeframe and possibly could be as short as 5 minutes, so a popular thread on a big web forum like this could bump an article straight up to the top from people linking into it.

Edited by zac510 on Tuesday 8th June 22:30