We got a heavy influx from Yahoo! visitors (hi guys!) - and while I was busy trying to keep the servers alive, Queuebot got a little too excited and posted 48 posts from the Upcoming Queue. That's a lot of posts!
Obviously some of the posts are of dubious quality - I'm going to go through them and fix what I can. We'll tighten the algo to improve the quality of posts that get promoted.
We're still working on the issues of search (the folks at Lijit are working hard to improve indexing and relevance) and duplicates (now admins can stop votings on things that are obviously dupes, I think we should enable flagging for duplicates). Like any good project, this one has its hiccups. We'll get them all straightened out soon. I thank you for your patience!
I'm predicting that a small number of dedicated users will dominate the Upcoming Queue. I'm okay with that, as long as the quality of the submissions remain high.
Great job trying to get this idea perfected. I think a lot of the problems can be solved with more stringent standards that can only be enforced by humans. That means a lot of work from the staff and I do really miss the old Neatorama. So far UQ hasn't produced anything like a regular post (even if it isn't a duplicate it's usually bland or pretty old) and it seems the staff is posting less and less (or maybe it just seems that way with the number of UQ posts increasing). The trade off hasn't been worth it and if the staff needs to devote even more time to filtering this stuff then that means even less Neato posts.
I'd just turn it into a way for people to submit tips. If they write about something particularly interesting and particularly well, then post that content and thank them with a link to their blog or something.
Obviously, there are kinks to be worked out. The software, VaroCMS by Rommel Santor, is marvelous. I can't say enough good things about it and about working with him. We just have to tinker with the implementation a bit, especially given the intrinsic nature of the blog as it has been for the past few years.
Re: Queue of the Day. It's a neat idea, but I'm afraid that it may just be too constricting.
@Paul - I just posted a test submission to the UQ, and found it to work ok. Perhaps clear your cache? We had a massive influx of visitors from Yahoo! yesterday and the servers probably were a bit tired :)
@someoneowned - yes, you're absolutely right! There have been many times that I thought a post wouldn't be too interesting turn out to be one of Neatorama's most popular posts. And vice versa - posts that I thought were a sure thing turned out to be duds. I've stopped thinking that I can arbitrate what is or is not interesting to other people :) And thank you for the kind words!
The kinks will work themselves out and you will find the path that you wish to take. It is your site after all, we are just visitors here. :)