At the moment, our front page has a total of five photographs: three most viewed, one latest, and one random photograph. The sixth is a screenshot from the latest video.
If you compare it to FleetPhoto, which could be considered as the Russian equivalent of Shipspotting.com, the difference is striking:
https://fleetphoto.ru/- 11 "most popular" photographs
- one photograph from a "photo contest" (no idea)
- 63 recently added photographs
- 21 random photographs
Could we develop our front page to a similar direction?
I like the "most viewed" section regardless of how the views are generated - it's just this site's "what's hot today" collection regardless of if it's due to high quality photographs, topical content, or hot discussion. Instead of the top three, that could be expanded to, say, top ten? Or include the other "most viewed" categories as well (day, week, month, year, ever)? I wouldn't count out external referrals - is that
really a problem?
Showing a wider spread of fresh photographs would mean that more shipspotters would get attention to casual visitors before their work is buried in the archives.
Similarly, a bigger selection of random photographs would attract more attention to the 2.7+ million photographs currently uploaded to the site, especially those buried deep in some less-visited or more-populated categories.
edit: ...and yes, it's possible to view photographs by diving deep into the site, but personally I'd prefer stopping by at the front page from time to time just to see if the great lottery machine has given me a prize in form of an interesting photograph. That's actually what I do with FleetPhoto...
edit 2: As for the original topic, yes, it doesn't hurt to use the site with a positive spin and give people comments when their photographs spark joy, not to mention starting an actual discussion under the photograph...