DOTAFire Update - January 18th, 2013

Its broken. I cant find my top rated Venomancer guide:-(

Agreed. I love this site, but with each new filter added it's getting harder and harder to find guides. First the build only/full guide feature was introduced, wherein a lot of good guides became hidden because they don't meet an arbitrary word length requirement. The freshness filter further compounds this visibility problem, as it hides away older guides that may still contain some of the best and most relevant information, including ideal item builds, skills orders, and general hero information and playstyle theory. The intention of both of these filters is good (to have in depth guides that are up-to-date) but as of now they make finding top-notch guides much harder than it should be. Giving a further option to disable freshness filtering would allow those of us who don't wish to use it the ability to do so easily without removing the option for those who do want to use it.

I would also suggest implementing a feature that would allow individual users to save to their profiles a set of default search parameters. I don't know if it's feasible or not, but it would save a lot of time for those of us who run the same type of searches repeatedly.

@D.E.A. sorry about that, there was a bug that was causing the freshness filter to apply to the publish date of the guide rather than the last update date. Your guide is appearing properly now! Let us know if you see any other problems!

@Miles OSmiles, these features were requested by the DOTAFire community, and have already been running in production on MOBAFire successfully for some time. This particular issue was a bug, it's fixed now.

The word length requirement is very easy to reach with a little effort, and it serves to encourage authors to spend a little more time providing useful content. Honestly, guides that are lower than that threshold are mostly just builds without much substance, this provides readers with a means to find guides written by authors that took that much more care. If you want to see just the builds, a quick toggle on the browse page will show them, but most readers don't want that.

The freshness filter is here for similar reasons. It encourages authors to update their guides. As the volume of guides increases more and more on DOTAFire, we reach a point where old guides that haven't been updated hold their seat in the #1 spot while fresh new guides struggle to get attention. This system rewards authors that maintain their guides, give new authors a chance to compete, and helps to present the most up to date content to our readers. That said, the current thresholds for the various levels of freshness may be too aggressive - we will be tweaking them to find a good balance.

Also, again, a quick toggle on the browse guides page will disable the freshness filter (just set it to "expired" and it will effectively be disabled) and show you all the guides that haven't been updated in a very long time, if you wish to see them.

We actually have considered a feature that would allow users to save filter settings, but it tends to lose out in our priority queue to other things that are more in demand. However, the browse page URLs are bookmark friendly, so you can always bookmark your favorite search settings in the mean time. Not quite as convenient, I know.

gud update