The problem right now is that we haven't had a new front-paged article since Feb 25, other than meetups and quotes threads.
Also, two of the meetup threads are exposing their summary, which shouldn't happen according to the convention decided last time this came up.
If there's any code intervention, I'd argue it would be easier to modify the meetup thread presentation on the front page to a single line, like how things are presented in the discussion section. (now there's 4-5 lines worth of fluff to announce a single meetup). I think this would be much simpler, and preserve much-needed visibility for the meetup threads.
The discussion section has sucked all the interesting topics away from the main page. What remained is a not very good advice column with a rationalist flavor. The last promoted article that interested me was posted on Jan 18, and the last non-promoted such article was on Feb 14 (not counting Stuart's posts, which are interesting but more of the "thinking out loud" variety). So I can safely stop checking "Recent Posts" for a month, or two months if I'm restricted to seeing promoted posts only. In the discussion section, on the other han...
The number of meetup announcements on the main blog has been increasing. Though it's reasonable to try to get meetups high visibility to increase the chance that people who are nearby see the announcement, the posts themselves are content-free.
How difficult would it be to, instead of promoting meetup announcements, tag them "meetup" and put a "meetups" section in the sidebar, similar to "recent comments" or "recent posts"?