793684 - Add a "random page" feature

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Design, enhancement)

Description

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

Most wikis offer a "visit a random page" button. This can be useful for people that just want to go somewhere at random either to look for things to update, or to find something new and different to read.

This should be an easy to find "Random article" button or menu option; the exact placement needs to be decided.

ubernostrum says: don't use Django's random(), instead select IDs, and do the random choice in Python, then fetch the article with that ID since ORDER BY rand() has horrific performance on MySQL.

Comment 1

[Jarek Śmiejczak [:jotes]]

Hi, I can take backend-side of this ticket if you you're interested.

Comment 2

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Hi Jarek. That's great!

I think we still need to decide if we want this feature in the product. Any thoughts Ali?

Comment 3

[Jean-Yves Perrier [:teoli]]

I'm not fond of this feature. Do we want this on all pages? Seems like page cluttering for me. 

Is there any metric that this would improve and that we can measure? Also I think we should ask UX about such feature.

In fact, I'm not convinced this is solving a real problem.

Comment 4

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

This not a high-priority feature. Indeed, I bet it's something that could be done in KumaScript code and put on a "special features" page somewhere. We should think about that.

Comment 5

[ali spivak]

I'm going to say no on this one. I don't see the benefit, and we have so much outdated content I worry people would be sent to something very much not useful.