The hot topics box on the right side of our homepage has been instrumental for our editors to find deals for the front page. After using it for a few years, we noticed that the box has dual purposes and there are generally 2 types of deal threads that show up. It has deals where users have voted favorably and it also has deals where there is a good amount of activity (views, replies) but it still needs to draw some eyeballs & votes to fully determine if it is Slickdealer approved.

We originally intended hot topics to only show the very best user voted deals but a lot of times the other deals tend to take over the real estate. It’s still very useful to drive traffic to the other deals so we decided to split them into two boxes one for hot topics and another for up & coming.

Hopefully this makes it easier for SD’ers to sort out the good deals. Try it out and let us know what you think.