arvindn's Journal: The section stories column is stupid

From what I've seen, the section stories column on the right of the main page seems to show a section selected at random, and this selection is changed once every few minutes. This is stupid. Some sections are far more active than others, but all get the same amount of time on the front page. And lets face it, most of us click the section stories only if they appear in this column, not bothering to check out each section page.

The science section is the most active. Its last 10 stories span only 2.5 days. OTOH, the apache section rarely has anything posted to it, its 10th most recent story being posted over 6 months ago! This means that an apache story continues to get front page time 6 months after it is posted.

A much better thing to do would be to use that section which has the most recent story posted to it. If that would result in the section column not changing often enough, it should be trivial to collect stats to find the relative freq of the sections and change the section column as often as desired but with each section getting exposure proportional to its activity.

What do you think of this idea? How does one bring such a thing to the editors' attention anyway? Just mail CmdrTaco?