It happens a lot of time that I find an interesting podcast, only to find that the last episode was uploaded one or two years ago. This is a bit disappointing every time.
Since I like to keep my podcast page clean with only active podcasts and I find this kind of trial-and-error search not enjoyable, I think it would be useful to have some visual mark for active podcasts.
Might be as simple as a green dot on one corner of the thumbnail, or such. An active podcast might be defined in a simple way (e.g. last upload is not older than 6 months) or could be relative to the average upload frequency (e.g. if up to the last episode the podcast was updated on a weekly basis but it has been 4 weeks since the last episode, it will lose the “active” mark).
Another useful mark would be a “Closed” or “Concluded” mark, that the podcas owner could use to manually signal that there will not be any more episodes. It could be as simple as a grey writing on a side of the thumbnail. This would be useful to clarify is a podcast is just inactive (on a hiatus, might resume anytime) or if it has been terminated or concluded.
Podcasts that are neither active or concluded (don’t qualify as “active”, but have not been “closed” by the owner) might be automatically marked as “inactive”, or could just be left unmarked (since they are not marked as active nor closed, their status is sufficiently clear anyway).
Another, even more clear solution, could be to simply display a “Last updated X days/weeks/months ago” under the podcast’s title. Or both solutions could be implemented at the same time for maximum clarity.
I think some kind of marking like these will be necessary because as of now the podcast section looks a bit chaotic. I saw that Spotify doesn’t have this feature either, so it could be another nice touch to add to Deezer’s interface.
Interesting idea! Thanks for creating it!