First a little background. The purpose of Newsstream is to bring all the news, blogs, and articles related to Ningin together in one place making it organized and easy to find. However, not every article on every website that we scan is worth reading. Not necessarily because the article is bad but perhaps it’s not related to Asian stuff. So we need users like you to determine if the article is worth the attention of Ningin users by promoting it.

The Ningin Newsstream scans something like 400 websites multiple times a day. All the new stories appear in our pending queue area for users to promote. Clicking on the promote icon records your vote for the story and helps make it popular.

We have two philosophies about how to determine worthy/popular articles. One is that if multiple Ningin users promoted the same story, then the story is most likely worthy for all Ningin users. The number of user votes needed to promote a story is what I call the popularity threshold. Stories that reach that threshold make it to the popular section.

The second is that high level users would know what’s best for Ningin because they got their high levels by spending a lot of time on Ningin. The higher the level of the user, the more stories they can promote bypassing the threshold requirement. A level 10 user has the ability to promote 3 stories a day bypassing the threshold (this ratio can change later though). After the third story, that user’s vote will count like a normal promotion vote. That’s why some stories you vote automatically get promoted to the popular section and some of them don’t.

Even if you don’t see your story get promoted, you still get EXP points for it.

Some of you have been mass promoting all articles for EXP points. That’s obviously not the intention of Newsstream and EXP. If a story wrongly makes it to the popular section of Newsstream and one of the admins have to delete it, you’ll lose a lot of EXP points. Today I deleted nearly 3 dozen stories and many people lost a lot of points. The EXP penalties for this are pretty severe because it takes a lot of votes to make a story popular and high level users should know better.

Also know that every single EXP event is logged and anomalous high daily scores do get flagged for me to look at.

Other Newsstream answers can be found in the faq.