Just noticed that TWHS news links (or any other site links) do not show at the TWHS page (see for example the recent one of Port of Banbhore).
Could you have a look at it @Nan - everything seems to be there: the right data, the reference to the site links in the template....

Would it be possible to divide the countries by UNESCO regions too in The List tab ? Would be helpful if only for the top missing discussion.

We have temporarily rebranded the main portion of the website to black. If you have wide pictures for the title bar, please ping me (<forum_name>@gmail.com).

@Clyde: Was thinking about regions, too. But will be part of the new site I am working on.

I am getting reports that there are some issues with updating your whs count today. This results in previous data getting lost (which I can restore, but it is manual work I'd rather avoid).
So leave the updating for a few days or so. I don't think you're going anywhere anyway.

Will look into how to solve the problem.

performance fix is ready and will be deployed shortly. consequence will be that updates will not be propagated as quickly to summary sites.

the mourning period on the website has ended. you may still see it in black due to caching. there is one more quick performance thing i plan to do and then we have to see.

nfmungard
I've checked you still can find the mourning version in some pages. It should not be associated to cache because I've tried with different navigators.
For example, you can see the normal branding in Spain or Germany pages, but you will see the black one in China or Zimbabwe

If you mean, the black styles in cache are from cache in server, then ignore my message, they will change soon.

Thanks for your work.

I would like to make a proposal to review the methodology it is being used for the Country Ranking.
They are using the same methodology as for the sites, and in my opinion, for sites is working fine. However, this methodology is showing in first position Zambia. Zambia has only one site that is shared with Zimbabwe (Victoria Falls), but Zimbabwe has more sites inscribed.
I mean, Zimbabwe should have a better position than Zambia, because Zambia is Victoria Falls, and Zimbabwe is Victoria Falls plus more sites.

I don't mean Zimbabwe should be the first in the ranking. But in my opinion, in a country ranking, Zambia should not be in any case in a better position than Zimbabwe.
The problem is I don't know how to do it. Maybe with the whole community we may find a better way to do this ranking.
What do you think about this?

It is connected to the server caching mechanism we use to enhance the performance (not browser caching), they will disappear within a day.

I just added the country rating for fun. I didn't tinker with the methodology so yes, there is room for improvement. On the other hand, less sites being better is also a conscious decision for quality over quantiy.

I can't agree more. Top countries in the list should be those with the best rated sites by the community.

If any of us would have to recommend a country to someone who wants to start visiting WH sites, I guess most of us would say Italy, France, Spain, China, Australia, Egypt, Peru, etc... However, those countries are not represented in the top of our list.
I agree quality should be the first option, but quantity should not be unconsidered. You know, one 50$ bill is better than 2x20$ but it is not better than 3x20$.

Last night I was thinking about a way to improve it. Maybe it is too simple, but I tried this formula:
Rate of the best rated site of the country * 1000 +
Rate of the second site * 100 +
Rate of the third one * 10 +
the sum of the rates of the other sites of the country.

I didn't test it with all the countries, I just took a few in order to see if I could get a better result. For example, I tried Cambodia (Angkor is the top site in the ranking) and I compared with China (lots of places). With the formula Cambodia was in a better position than China, so it keeps the quality as the first thing to consider. The countries only would change the position when the top site of each country have a very similar rate (one or two decimals), then the second one will be important too and so on...
The reason to use 1000, 100... was to avoid those countries with a low number of sites would go down if their main sites was top. I think the result I had was good enough to consider a try.

Probably, with this, we would get Italy in the top (not sure, I didn't test it), but they have 3 sites in our top 20 (Rome, Venice and Florence).
You can try if you want.

By the way, while testing this, I could see something strange: If you see the rates in a country page (Cambodia in example) and you compare the rates with the score in the sites ranking, they are matching. Perfect. However, if you compare in the list of sites by country, they don't match.
In addition, I tried to use the "Search" option in the top of the page of sites by country, using Edge and Chrome in my PC and it didn't work for me.

Thanks again for your excellent work.

We made a few changes to the database (kind of materialized views) and with the listboxes. Both issues are related and I will check over the weekend.

Re country rating, I think for starters you would recommend hotspots. Hotspot ratings would be fun :)

Sure!! I would like to see a hotspot rating. It's a great idea.
Please take into account the way to order those hotspots in the ranking should be the same way the countries are ordered. So it would be a good moment to try a new way. ;-)

I'm sorry to be bore, but I've got a new idea for the ranking:
You could count for each country/hotspot the number of sites rated with 4.5 or higher and order. For those with the same number, count the sites with 4.0 or higher, later 3.5 and so on...
You could even do smaller blocks. Instead of blocks of 0.5, you could do 0.3 (for example).

These are just some ideas to evaluate in case you consider to improve the country/hotspot rankings.

Thanks!!

I don't think these discussions belong in this threat... Should be more about IT than rating methodology. I think we have a thread for that ;)