Automatically Idle All Hubs with a Score Below 30

1. 87

   Marisa Wrightposted 11 years ago

   We all know that Hubs start out with a score in the middle of the range and then go up or down depending on various factors.  We also know that for a HubScore to be seriously low, there has to be something seriously wrong with it.
   
   Why not, then, simply idle all Hubs with a score below a certain figure?
   
   It would have the advantage of removing a large number of low-scoring Hubs from the Hopper. At present, they just clog up the system (since they'll probably wind up getting flagged and deleted at some point anyway).

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   1. 87

      IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      +1

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   2. 95

      Peggy Wposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I think that is a great idea Marisa!  I did not realize that they could even go that low since most of them start out at around 50 or so.  If the scoring is done immediately, it would save some time on everyone's part.  I liked the hopper better when we could skip from one topic to another as it was in the past.  If I am not interested in a topic, no matter how well it is written, I was able to more quickly skim to one that sounded interesting and then read it.  The way it is now, I seldom use the hopper especially if that first article holds no interest.

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      1. 84

         Marcy Goodfleischposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Peggy - we can still use the old Hopper - it is available through a small link in the 'box' on the new Hopper.  It says "Classic" Hopper, and it's the same one as before.  Many of us prefer it to the new one.

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         1. 87

            IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            I'm sure I miss plenty of the really poor hubs, but I use the feed to check the latest hubs.
            
            Those now are the hubs which have passed their 24 hour pending, or are written by the pets that don't have to go through pending.
            
            http://hubpages.com/hubs/latest/
            
            Titles with poor grammar or spelling are possible signs of a substandard hub, and quite often the summary gives a clue too, so you can quickly see which hubs might be worth opening to check.
            
            The hopper annoyed me when I was on a low bandwidth when I lived in Spain. It's not so bad now.

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         2. 95

            Peggy Wposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Hi Marcy,
            
            I did not realize that we still had access to the old hopper.  Will look for that "classic" box.  Thanks!

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   3. 84

      Marcy Goodfleischposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I think this is a good suggestion - and I also think there are many hubs with low scores that won't be flagged, simply because they either don't get enough traffic, or people don't know to flag bad content (as we saw a bit ago on the thread about idled hubs). Maybe this is already a piece of the algorithm, but if not, it should be considered.
      
      Thanks for suggesting!

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   4. 80

      Dale Hydeposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I am in agreement 100 percent.
      
      Is this a staff monitored thread?

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   5. 86

      daisydayzposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      This is exactly what I proposed on one of Bards threads. It would make far more sense to just idle ones below a certain hub score, logically a well written hub should never drop below a certain point really so this would be far more fair a way of judging quality hubs rather than traffic.

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   6. 85

      aa liteposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I agree with you, I can't understand why HP goes to the lengths of idling hubs, outsourcing hub hopping etc. without first deleting pages with very low scores.
      
      The only concern I would have, is I have noticed the longer I have a hub in draft form, the lower its score falls.  So if somebody likes to work on their hubs for a while, using the hub tool, rather that writing it up on word and then pasting in at the last minute, it ends up with an initial low score.  Not sure if it ever falls below 30 though.

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2. 87

   Cardisaposted 11 years ago

   I agree. I have never seen a hub below 44 and that's a new hub. What would make a hub drop below 30? Wow, that's really new to me. Goes to show how much I don't know

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   1. 87

      IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      I don't think new hubs go that low. It's within hours or days of publication, so if they get missed in the hopper, they are on the site with nothing to stop them unless someone stumbles upon them accidentally.
      
      We have thousands of such hubs already published.
      
      Unfortunately they are really hard to find since HP took away the feed to let you see hubs by score.
      
      There is no guarantee they are idled now, especially if they bring in traffic.

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      1. 87

         Cardisaposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Would a hub that low bring in traffic? I doubt that since hubscores fluctuate depending on the amount of traffic and such. When my hubs get stagnant they drop very low in mid 60s. Recently I deleted some poems because they got stagnant and a few dropped to 55-59.
         
         Hubs that low are maybe hubs that have been sitting there for ages and ages.

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         1. 87

            IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

            Yes I think you are right. However, there are exceptions.
            
            http://redmachine76.hubpages.com/
            
            Hubberscore 1.
            
            Many of his hubs were #1 in search for the longest time. He has also unpublished about 1000 hubs.
            
            With no original words in his hubs, basically they are all copied content.
            
            Still published, still getting traffic, though I doubt if it is on the levels he previously saw.

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            1. 87

               Cardisaposted 11 years agoin reply to this

               I assume that Marissa was referring to the hubscore and not the hubberscore. His hubberscore being at 1 doesn't mean his hubs scores are below a certain level.
               
               Forgive me if I am confused...so sleepy. That's what you get when you don't want to go to bed...lol

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               1. 87

                  IzzyMposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                  Yes she was referring to hubscore.
                  
                  Unfortunately I can't see the hubscore of any of his hubs. Hubberscore being 1 is a HUGE CLUE to something not being quite right, don't you think?

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                  1. 87

                     Cardisaposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                     Yes you are aright Izzy, I wish we could still see the hubscores to have an idea of what we are looking at. It would be interesting to see some of his scores. I noticed he had a lot of content that was basically just copy and paste, like the quotes. Not enough original content. I did a quote hub and 3/4 of the hub was my interpretation of each quote.

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                  2. 84

                     Marcy Goodfleischposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                     I agree with that (sorry for jumping in the conversation!). A great service could be done if those profiles with low Hubber scores could be reviewed and addressed. I've seen others that are super low, and they appear to be people who moved on, or never published anything to begun with.  What I don't know is how the profile pages impact HP as a whole.  Some of these profiles have no bio, no photo, no hubs, no nothing.  What use is that to the site?

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                     1. 87

                        Cardisaposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                        We have been asking to make profile bio and avatar mandatory for a long time and people that have been on the site for a while have cast the idea in the garbage. I think a profile and avatar should me mandatory for the sake of the site in the eyes of Google because that search engine values home page content.

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                        1. 87

                           Marisa Wrightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                           How weird.  I've seen the suggestion made several times and I agree it should be mandatory. 
                           
                           I know people have objected to the idea that we should use a real photo or be forced to write our life story - but I see no problem with requiring something on the profile.  Though I dont know if it would really make much difference.

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                           1. 87

                              Cardisaposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                              I don't think it would make a difference as far as trolls are concerned but it would in terms of site value. We have to figure out a way to make this site less appealing to spammers and trolls. We also have to figure out a way to relieve the site of people who just copy and paste stuff from the internet, like the one Izzy shared.

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                  3. 85

                     aa liteposted 11 years agoin reply to this

                     I would say that a hubberscore of 1 is pretty terrible, but if a hubber published good stuff a couple of years' ago, and hasn't been at the site since then.  Didn't comment, hub hop, participate in the forums or publish any new hubs, then I imagine their hubberscore would fall really low.  But that doesn't mean that their hubs are harming the site. 
                     But I agree with Marissa and with you, why have hubscores and hubber scores and not use them to find the bad content on the site?  They are probably not very good measures, but very low scores should at least arouse suspicion and will make it easier to find spam.

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3. 63

   nightnightposted 11 years ago

   +1

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4. 87

   Marisa Wrightposted 11 years ago

   To be honest, it's a very long time since I even noticed what HubScores were on anyone's Hubs, including my own.  So I don't know how low they get - things could easily have changed!
   
   Maybe HubberScore would be a better thing to target?   Either way, surely there is some way to leverage off the scoring system we already have.

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5. 90

   Thundermamaposted 11 years ago

   Hey this is a great idea and a pretty foolproof way to unclog the system. Wonder why HP hasn't thought of this already. There must be a reason.

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6. 77

   derek gulbransonposted 11 years ago

   Thanks for the suggestion Thundermama.
   
   HubScore and Featured/Idled Hubs are not directly related, but a HubScore of 35 would pretty much guarantee it would not be Featured. So basically yes, we're already doing this. Although, the threshold is a lot higher than a HubScore of 35.

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   1. 87

      Marisa Wrightposted 11 years agoin reply to this

      Derek, that's why we made this suggestion.  We can all see that HubScore is being ignored in the Idled algorithm, because we're still seeing awful Hubs with pitiful HubScores in the Hopper.
      
      We're just perplexed why HubPages wouldn't use their own scoring mechanism in the Idled algorithm - if HP has so little confidence in the scoring system, perhaps it's time they retired it.

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      1. 77

         derek gulbransonposted 11 years agoin reply to this

         Yes, we agree with you and that will likely come soon. HubScore is too heavily dependent on traffic, which is really a trailing indicator of quality. With our whole quality initiative we're working on a Quality Assessment Process, which includes human ratings from the Hopper, that we hope will provide a more accurate and trustworthy assessment of quality. But until we get to the point that we are confident this new calculation is better, we'll leave the current HubScore implementation as is. We'll be putting out more communication about this in the next few weeks.
         
         I dug into this a bit more and it appears that with HubScore there are cases where Hubs with a low HubScore are still featured. It's a very small percentage of Hubs with those low HubScores. This is likely due to the fact that these Hubs still garner significant traffic, so we're reluctant to no longer Feature these Hubs without a real human being assessing it in the Hopper to confirm that it is indeed low quality.
         
         And there is one other valid reason why you will see low quality Hubs in the Hopper. Different people have different biases for how they rate the quality of content. In order to normalize the human ratings to account for these biases, the algorithm needs to you rate some bad Hubs too. So we purposely include some very low quality Hubs in the Hopper so we can gain confidence that when presented with a low quality Hub you would rate it as such. We try to keep the number of these Hubs to a minimum.

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