How does related posts actually work?

Hi Marcelo,

If you could just stick with us a little bit longer… we are trying to iron out the problem. What’s happening is that we are doing some work on our Analytics tool as well as the data-end of the Related Content app while in the process of enhancing this feature. We will have things running smoothly again as quickly as possible.

The engineering ticket ID concerning this issue is SHR-616. As soon as this is fixed, I’ll be in contact to make sure your new and recent content is being recommended to your readers. Thank you so much for your patience and support while we continue working to improve our Related Content feature.

Hi there, any news regarding this “bug” or behaviour?

I wonder if your Analytics tool base its recommendations upon the wordpress tags that I set for every post I publish. If so, it should retrieve the fresher news and simply weight the more relevant ones by near date.

But if your Analytics tool does a semantic processing over the text contents, then you probably provide an unrelated mess when it comes to languages other than english I guess. And that’s what I’ve observed in my websites ??

Looking forward for your input. Oh and I want to stick to your plugin, it has a very big potential if you can fix a couple glitches.

Yea, I have been using shareholic for a week, and the related post is still processing. How sad is that.

Hi guys,

We are currently processing sites into a new data management system with many enhancements from the previous data manager; this new engine will handle both our Related Content and Analytics reporting. We expect to have it live next week.

As we have a large user base, the batch processing is a multi-day task, and because we are in the transition period, publishers new to Related Content are in a holding pattern until we get everything up and running with the new engine. All other publishers who have data that was previously processed should experience a smooth transition in the Related Content feature (with an updated indexing of their site) once switched from the old engine to the new engine.

Your patience is wonderfully appreciated as we continue the upgrade process. I’ll update this thread as soon as we have things up and running.

Great news Celeste. No ETA available? maybe one week? two?

Hi,

So here’s an update from this end:

We hope to have fully transitioned to the new data management system by the end of the week. The update to our Analytics tool will soon follow. We also have several enhancements planned for the Related Content feature that will take full advantage of the new data engine; these updates will be released once they are coded and tested within the coming months.

There’s a lot to do, several improvements positioned to take affect down the line, and we are on track, getting there slowly but surely. Thank you for sticking with us while we continue upgrading our service and tools. ??

@tzshng

If you haven’t contacted us directly via our support center, could you please provide your website address so that I can make sure your site has been processed into the new engine so that recommendations will populate for you as soon as we’ve completed the transition? Thanks so much!

@celeste
Great. I hope to see the news right in the changelog soon ??

@celeste,

Great. I’ll send an email to your support. Thank you for follow up.

Celeste,

Any news on the revamped Related Content engine? My current websites are showing “related” content that really have nothing related. I think this engine only have to match tags and categories to show a related, weighed, list from where it can choose what will offer to the visitors. Also, this weighed list should be automatically updated when you post new articles.

I sincerely tested other plugin in one of my sites, nRelate Related Content, and it does all this, locally, without server-to-server requirements, and more importantly, showing exactly what you would expect and without overloading the server: the plugin indexed data from 800 posts, 600 tags and 20 categories in less than 5 minutes. Also, if you could implement their actually non working, text mode widget, nRelate Most Popular, using similar templates (tip: the Engadget like one), you could win a lot of trust. But, you should (and can) do a better work.

No more news on this regarding your new Related Content engine? I see blank images made of the title of the posts since several days ago… ??

I have 2 tickets in support for a few weeks now and not getting anywhere. I had to disable the related posts feature because it would lock up the blog post screen meaning I couldn’t click on any links at all nor get to admin dashboard. I had to open new browser window to login to disable the feature.

Of course all of the plugin updates didn’t fix this issue for people using IE9 on windows vista. Heck, I just added a new theme 2 days ago thinking it was poor coding or one of my coding tweaks effecting related posts but that was not the case.

Hi! I just ran across this thread when sifting through old cases. The best way to get a hold of us quickly is by submitting a request through our support center. This will also allow you to receive personalized help.

Now, onto the questions.

How Related Content works:

First, when our plugin is installed on your site, our server attempts to index the pages of your site by checking for an XML sitemap and retrieving the URLs from this list, passing them into our processing queue to be crawled as individual pages.

When the pages are crawled, we extract various pieces of data that are used in calculating the relationship of one page to another. Meta tags are definitely useful to provide more information about your content.

We have continued to work on the intelligence portion of this app so as to improve the calculated relationship between pages. This is a complicated coding process, so I am unable to provide specific details in how the machine learns, but it is the backbone to the Related Content app.

Once we have data for each page, a file is generated to summarize a list of pages so that it can be passed along to the recommendations engine, which handles the delivery of your recommendations. The app is a very complex network of systems that work together to produce this feature, and it will continue to improve as we further refine the code.

There are additional aspects that aren’t explained above, but this is generally how Related Content works at this time.

If you are having trouble with images, you might just need to refresh your page data in our system. Here’s an article with information on how you can do this independently from your settings panel.

And if you have any additional questions, concerns or issues that haven’t yet been resolved, please do submit a request through our support center with your website address, a description of the problem, and any steps you have taken to try and resolve it independently. Thanks so much and happy holidays!

Hello Celeste. Thank you for the clarification.
One thing you are not describing is how the Featured Content work for non-english languages. Does it analyzes semantically the contents or only thru the tags? I’m asking this because my sites are in spanish and sometimes I detect unrelated featured content being recommended, when in fact there is more valuable and relevant contents to recommend.
Any thoughts will be welcomed.

Hey again, Mercelo ??

Good observation! At this time, Related Content is optimized for English-language sites, but this is one of the aspects we wish to expand as development continues.

If you would like to contact us directly through our support center with an account of what you’ve observed on your sites, some suggestions of how you’d like to see this feature improved including examples, and any other feedback you have to offer in regards to Related Content, we’d love to hear from you! And I’ll make sure your email is also forwarded to the engineer who works on this aspect of the product.

Related Content is an active project that we work on daily, so expect many advancements through the coming year and beyond. We are striving to make this feature the best available and have greatly improved functionality–leaps and bounds–over just the past couple months since this version, which was built entirely from scratch, was released.

This isn’t a project we will be neglecting or abandoning. It’s high priority, and we look forward to delivering the most amazing related content feature around. Stay tuned!