A couple of observant people have asked why we don't process our news articles in a strictly chronological order - ie sometimes we authorise newer news posts before older ones. There isn't a huge conspiracy and we haven't perfected our time travel device yet, it's purely a matter of balancing what's coming in at one end (the submissions) with what goes out the other end (the front page news) whilst keeping a good mix of interesting stuff.
We get lots of news coming through the system every day, and obviously can't put all of it on the front page or people would get fed up of news vanishing within mere hours, sometimes only to be replaced with total rubbish. As a result we have our editing queue and try to keep a steady flow of articles without overburdening you, and this means we can't always give a yes/no decision on an article straight away. Let me explain further.
Our editing queue.Excellent news articles are authed for front page display immediately, no questions asked. They then appear on the front page straight away (There's some complex buffering and caching going on here, but it's usually pretty quick). At the other end of the scale are the posts that don't deserve front page exposure, the "looking for a coder" and "we've just started" posts. These are relegated to profiles only. Then there are those in the middle which are good enough for the front page, but don't leap out and grab your attention.
On a really good news day, we have loads of excellent articles and so we don't need many of the good-enough articles to keep a steady flow. Conversely, on a bad day we're often forced to lower the barrier to entry in order to keep the front page content fresh. More commonly we have a mix of the excellent and the good-enough, carefully blended to make sure you're not swamped with model renders or too much text (And you thought we just did it all at random). As a result of trying to keep this mix our editors often leave some of the good-enough articles in the queue so that they can be picked up later if we have a drop in excellent submissions, or need something to break the monotony. Since the news articles are sorted by date, sometimes you'll see a 'new' article appear under one you've seen before or see an article posted after yours make it out of the editing queue first.
We aim for pieces of news to spend no longer than six hours in the queue even if they're in the good-enough category, and try to get as much news as possible on the front page.
I hope that's cleared up another point of how Mod DB works behind the scenes and how we make sure we're the best site for mod news.
