The process for dealing with “Expired” schedule items is a little bit simpler now. Here is the life cycle of a schedule item – knowing this makes it clearer what to do and what the objectives are.
Beginning – an item has just been tested. The goal is to retest all items every 30 days, but the objective is NOT to list every station for every program. The clock is now ticking.
At 20 days, the listing will sprout “Did it work?” to let people know the item is ripe for testing. The option to test does NOT show up until then for two main reasons – first, we don’t want to annoy the radio stations by constantly “testing” their streams over and over and diluting their own internal web metrics. Secondly, if people are focused on things that don’t need testing, the less well known programs or stations aren’t being tested at all.
At (Expiration Date – 10) days (currently (75-10)=65 days), the “Did it Work?” changes to “Save me!” – so for 55 days nobody has yet clicked the Did it Work? and move the item back to tested. You have another week to save it.
After the item Expires, it shows no link to test – just a link saying EXPIRED, to entice people to become a volunteer if they really want that listing to come back. The EXPIRED link stays there until 135 days since the last test, at which point it is automatically deleted. During that time, you still have the option of going directly to the station’s web site to find the stream.
In many cases, I delete the schedules after 120 days – usually because the show has 30 or 40 other higher quality affiliates – or the station airs prestream ads when the show is available at the same time on other stations without ads. I also look at whether anyone actually listened to the show in the 75+ days the link was active.
If you see an EXPIRED listing and want to bring it back (hopefully because you want to listen to the show), and you’re a volunteer, as of today it will take you right to the page of expired listings. From that page, you can test the listing and bring it back if the schedule information is still accurate.
Expired items are a yes/no choice – either it worked or it didn’t (and we don’t care). If the program schedule has changed, you can delete the expired item to make it go away, but I’m not interested in getting an email telling me that a new program is on now. If it wasn’t important enough for two and half months, it isn’t a high priority to fix – there are way too many other things that need weeding and fertilizing.
Recently an additional test was added to make sure the “outdated” item was actually being tested prior to being deleted, as I was finding a number of still valid (but expired) schedule items. Deleting the items before their time is up deprives other visitors and volunteers of the opportunity to notice the expired item and “bring it back”.