Although I am a pretty active digg user it was a surprise for me. I have been seeing stories on upcoming for more than 24 hours and as usual my first guess was that it might be a bug on digg’s algorithm, but I guess that’s not true. After talking to couple friends on IM, I think it is pretty much confirmed that Digg has changed it’s algorthm to let submissions stay for 48 hours before it is kicked out of the upcoming section. Although nothing is official since Digg can’t disclose any changes regarding changes in algorithm, it seems like the change has been made. Here are a few images from the most diggs upcoming pages which clearly show that stories will stay for more than 24 hours in the upcoming section.

Click image to enlarge

Image 1: Stories on Digg showing submissions on upcoming that are over 24 hours

Image 2 : All stories shown here are over 24 hours as well

The images were taken from the first upcoming page. If you take a look at the second and third page and so on you will see the same pattern where stories are older than 24 hours. Although there has been a lot of discussion about Digg’s algorithm making it hard for stories to hit the frontpage, I personally think this change wan’t needed at all. 24 hour deadline for submissions to make it to the frontpage was more than enough, in my opinion. With 48 hours deadline to hit the frontpage one of the thing that most users will notice is it will require more diggs as you can see in the first image where the first submission has 379 diggs and is still on the upcoming page. What about breaking news?

Although nothing officially has been said by the Digg crew regarding these changes, I think we can all conclude that submissions will stay on upcoming page for 48 hours rather than 24 hours like it used to be. But again, we can never be sure. By the time I am done writing this there might be something else going on with Digg already. Who knows? Do you?

Update #1 : Please take a look at this image and compare it with the first image on this post. Click to enlarge

So, is it a bug? Are submissions going to stay for 48 hours or more on upcoming? Share your thoughts.

Update #2 : - It’s a digg bug! The upcoming page is now showing submissions that are 24 hours or less.