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Comment by nsomaru | Hacker News Reader

How do you intend on keeping track of change to sites? Eg, Gmail tutorials for the old compose interface will soon be rendered obsolete.

How will you deal with aging, increasingly inaccurate content? The rot will be slow and correction will be tedious.*

Ranking also seems relevant if you choose to go the 'social proof via up votes' route.

A content community (which I believe something like this is trying to create) is great. A content community that curates itself is just awesome.

*edit, previously: "How will you deal with aging, old, inaccurate content?" [added content rot as an after thought, 'aging' describes the reason for the 'inaccuracy' (rot) ]

Disclaimer: this is posted from mobile. Haven't had a chance to give the plugin a spin.

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Yes, we are trying to build content community which can curate and update. we have reputations like stackoverflow.

We have also implemented failure tracking mechanism to check when guides don't execute correctly. Failure tracking feature is pre-mature as of now, once tracking improves, we will mark it for community to improve the guides or discard them.

A thought: one way to do this might be having a service diffing the HTML of whatever page guide X is for. For things like Facebook your diff would have to be smart enough to differentiate between 'content' and 'structure'. You could then flag guides based on that. But I imagine most guides are written/maintained in-house so this isn't a problem at this point.

Where do you guys work from?

We collect lots of information about the element that we need to highlight (text, depth, siblings etc). When we fail to identify element accurately, we try to find best one with highest score and highlight. We mark flow as a failure and exit, when we hit score below minimum. This algorithm is most crucial one & i guess it will be evolving ever. By this mechanism, we are trying to overcome page changes to good extent.

Very few guides are in house and mostly are contributed by early adopters. we are expecting users to contribute.

We are based out of bangalore, india.

any user with more than 500 reputations can edit any guides, with more than 1000 reps can delete the guides. so such users can edit any other user's guides and help in keeping them upto date. User's can get reputations when other's run their flows or vote up.

That coinage is sweet! 'run a flow'.

The users of the future will not browse anytjing. They will run flows, and it will be natural :-) Content about content! It's so meta.

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