Blue Tracker is not particularly helpful

[Taen]

I'm not sure if it's a side effect of how Blizzard posts and cross-posts on their own site, but for a while now I've noticed that the blue tracker gets gunked up with multiples of every post. Every news item gets posted 3x or 4x resulting in tons of wasted space and defeating the purpose of having an overview of the latest blue posts. I've put a screenshot below but I'm sure everyone's seen it on the main page.

Forum filters have been great at turning the "Recent Forum Posts" box into a very useful overview — if this is an issue that can't be solved due to the way Blizzard runs their forums could we get an EU/US toggle to at least somewhat cut down on the repetition?

[LolFrank]

Could be an easy solution to include a toggle, but it'd be up to the enduser to toggle between regions. There are multiple GMs that handle specific locations, so some could include additional information that the other region did not mention. It's just been this way since the blue tracker was implemented in like 2007-2008.

[Taen]

Could be an easy solution to include a toggle, but it'd be up to the enduser to toggle between regions. There are multiple GMs that handle specific locations, so some could include additional information that the other region did not mention. It's just been this way since the blue tracker was implemented in like 2007-2008.

I do always remember there being duplicates for US and EU, but it feels newer that things are duplicated as much as they are. When clicking through it seems that the culprit is Blizzard's habit of publishing everything as a news post, then posting another smaller post under the same name linking back to it. Which is why I think this is an issue with the way Blizzard makes the posts, rather than how MMO-C collects them.

In the past it might not have been necessary to do any pruning when everything was only doubled by region, but now I figure any sort of available fine-tuning would help.

[chaud]

I don't love it either, but I haven't come up with a great solution yet. The posts often have different dates for each region, plus sometimes different content. Sometimes the forum posts that point to a blog article show up before the blog. I'll think about how to at least make the widget on the front page more useful. The most likely approach will just to be show an item once per title, as most users won't bother to set a region.

[Taen]

I don't love it either, but I haven't come up with a great solution yet. The posts often have different dates for each region, plus sometimes different content. Sometimes the forum posts that point to a blog article show up before the blog. I'll think about how to at least make the widget on the front page more useful. The most likely approach will just to be show an item once per title, as most users won't bother to set a region.

Thank you Chaud, appreciate the insight into your thought process. Looking forward to whatever you’re able to cook up.

[chaud]

I went ahead and limited items to once per title in the widget. I've got some ideas about making the tracker (and the resulting feed that shows up in the widget) a little cleaner too, but it'll be a while before I get around to working on the blue tracker again. They are on my to-do list though!