“Couldn't agree more.”

“I apologise in advance if this response seems patronising. I don't mean it to be.

If you are on the news page (I haven't checked the others), below the banner headline with large photo is a line with the following "News", "Now Showing" and a drop down menu with the following options:

"Latest,"
"Most Recently Active,"
"Most Commented,"
"Most Recommended."

This use of this drop down menu will prioritise stories as you wish.

You may have missed it because when I opened that page this morning the drop down menu took a lot longer than everything else to appear so one might have concluded that this facility had dissappeared!

Hope this helps :)”

“Some of the more important/interesting news gets knocked of page 10, for what? A BOGOF advert? A photo? My musings? Bally ridiculous! TiG, if it's a glitch, get it fixed. If it's an 'improvement' it's not.”

“Having said much the same in a recent post myself I wholeheartedly agree, but is anyone at TIG listening? If you want people to keep logging on in large numbers, attract more advertising as a consequence, and achieve more 'hard copy' sales then the TIG front page needs to have mass appeal with minority interest 'filler' copy consigned to pages 7 to 10.

On another subject do you still 'employ' community/village agents? There must be dozens of retired and under-employed people, stay-at-home mothers etc, with fingers on the pulse in their local communities who could provide you with useful copy and it need not cost you a bean!”

“Aha! Thank you eyeopener. :) No offence taken. I admit whole heartedly to being cyber challenged! Pretty sure there are others like me... No really.”

“eyeopener

I just clicked on the "most active". The top story had no comments or recommendations!”

“Maybe TiG have realised that the majority of their readers want the latest published news and aren't interested in the views of the loudmouth minority. This website must attract thousands of visitors but the comments are populated by the same 20 people the whole time who just talk amongst themselves.”

“Yes you can set it to list "Most recently active", but you have to do this yourself, manually. The point is that the website used to be set to do this automatically as the default article listing method.

It has changed, and I too find it worse than it used to be.”

“Harsh, agent006.
I used to find that the articles we ourselves (you included), *bumped* were generally the most note worthy. (This post excepted, but then this post wouldn't be here.)
Page one is a trickle of advertisements and add ons to the daily news.
Todays most note worthy piece, and the days most commented on, 'Lindsay Sandifords death sentence', is sliding down page 3 and will vamoose into the ether when Stroud Life make their weekly appearance tomorrow.”

“agent006

"Maybe TiG have realised that the majority of their readers want the latest published news and aren't interested in the views of the loudmouth minority"

Common sense would tell you that the majority of people are interested in the accepted main stories of the day and that those stories should have priority. Do you really think someone visiting the site for the first time today would be more interested to read about trivia and tittle tattle rather than the death sentence given to Lindsay Sandiford (now languishing at the top of page 4 with 14 comments)?”

“Eyeopener makes a very good point. I think the main reason the pages take so long to load, though, is the plethora of adverts (especially those damn internet links that jump the page up and down) that TiG seem to rely on as revenue. What's the point of putting the advertisers ahead of the readers, though, if there are fewer readers left to see the ads?”

“by agent006

Tuesday, January 22 2013, 12:29PM

"Maybe TiG have realised that the majority of their readers want the latest published news and aren't interested in the views of the loudmouth minority. This website must attract thousands of visitors but the comments are populated by the same 20 people the whole time who just talk amongst themselves."

TiG had a way of handling that, if they didn't want old stories 'bumped' to Page 1. Some stories would stay right where they were even after two or more new comments, so there must be a box that can be ticked to allow/prevent it.

The same argument about loudmouth minorities was used to justify closing most of the BBC's message boards, but why penalise those who are prepared to engage, just because others aren't? Unless you're suggesting that those other readers are being discouraged from participating as well, by this 'minority'?”

“The 'bumping' issue seems to have been fixed on the discussions page, if not the news pages, but as the article about this offer by the county council/Highways is long gone now, I thought it would be useful to highlight it here. I can't even find the article in search, so her's the council's page:

http://tinyurl.com/a77jg2e

And this is the link to the page containing (a little ways down) the list of what is available to residents to buy with the £10,000 being offered for road improvements.

http://tinyurl.com/aq3yucp

Readers will soon appreciate that the cash doesn't go very far. Maybe it's just me, but this appears more like the previous consultation by the (city?) council, which mainly seemed to be about showing us what an arduous task setting priorities was, rather than really giving us a say. In this instance, the aim seems to be to demonstrate how even an apparently big sum of money doesn't go very far when the real costs are known.

So the question I'd ask is, are we better off accepting this offer, and using the money for a traffic island and some road markings, if we're lucky, or splashing out on 200 (new) signs? Given that the consequence are that we lose out on some basic services that, as the word 'basic' implies, used to be standard, not something we had to buy into with limited funds?

Or should we reject the offer, and just request/demand whatever it takes to keep our streets safe and tidy? It's always seemed to me that Gloucester residents are not very motivated about calling for action, so maybe that isn't such a good idea and we should settle for something rather than nothing, even if it is the county councillor who chooses, because no-one else wanted to be involved with deciding how to spend the money either...”

“Sorry, could have sworn I was on the main discussion page. See new discussion...”