Feature Requests / Website changes
Submitted By: Blipswitch
Use this thread to request new features and changes. Since this forum is very different from the old board, I'm sure a few of you will have comments and suggestions.
I'll be doing weekly(ish) builds of the site from now one, so hopefully your requests will get implemented quickly. :)
Some things that have already been pointed out:
1) Change the avatars on the comments and posts back to the way they were on the old message board (ie: larger, and on the left).
2) Buttons for quick BBcode editing. (You can insert BBcode and HTML into posts now, and I understand that buttons would be helpful.)
few things i've come across so far...
1 - theres no way to mark topics read, and it's saying i have tons of "new" messages.
2 - you should be able to rate an event anonymously. showing publicly your rating of things is only going to lead to rating inflation and/or hurt feelings. does it list you ONLY when you give something 4 or 5 stars or what? if so, that might be OK.
3 - if you start your event posting with an image, it shows up all huge and obnoxious in the "upcoming" column. is there a way around that other than adding text at the beginning of your event post?
www.facebook.com/bird415 | www.myspace.com/bird415
www.kontrolsf.com | www.myspace.com/kontrolsf
www.afterglowsf.com | www.myspace.com/afterglowsf
oh and also...
some of the html i'm using doesn't work, i.e. <.b.> instead of <.strong.>
can you add more codes to be recognized? changing all b's to strong's is a major pain.
sorry to sound like a whiner, but you DID ask. :)
----> GB
www.facebook.com/bird415 | www.myspace.com/bird415
www.kontrolsf.com | www.myspace.com/kontrolsf
www.afterglowsf.com | www.myspace.com/afterglowsf
1) Yeah, there was no way to import the status of posts, so basically all of the posts in the Forum are "New". I'll include an option to mark them all as read
2) I understand your thoughts about the rating. I'll consider making it anonymous. It only shows people that rated an event favorably. I'm not sure how different it is to Going.com's "Users that like this event" section for each event posting.
3) Hmmm, do you mean in the left sidebar it is showing up huge, or in the main content area?
4) I added the HTML tag that you requested .
Ahh, I see what you are saying now. Yeah, that's a bug. Thanks for pointing that out Greg. Fixed.
I like the new site's look. Any way you could make the graphic of the audio cable in the top left different? How about some nice fat quarter inch cables instead of those headphone jack eighth inchers? ;-)
I'm annoying I know...
www.myspace.com/moniker415
www.222hydesf.com
www.myspace.com/222hyde
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/San-Francisco-CA/222-Hyde/886030...
Haha. Yeah, those are supposed to be 1/4" cables... I guess they look like 1/8" cables. I won't claim to be the best illustrator, haha. It is all about relative scale I guess.
Anyways, I was planning on having that background graphic change every month...Or (more realistically) when I have time to draw up something new. :)
emoticons are gone :(
http//www.limaconmusic.com
http//www.myspace.com/limaconhatesmyspace
- Pokerflat - Resopal - Force Inc. - Auralism - Thoughtless -
I know, they will be back soon :)
i miss the old site. :)
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http://kirkwoodwest.com
+1
frustrating and not intuitive... or maybe too easy. something. just not sitting well.
Alland Byallo
Nightlight Music | [KONTROL] | Forward SF
yeah, its as simple as being able to go to one page for everything i needed to know or find out....
I understand, though, that this is more of a label site now, which is what you want...
but for quick browsing purposes the one-page-has-everything-i-need-to-know thing is hard to get over ;)
Mattie Bowen/Mossmoss | Racecarprod. | NLMX/Nightlight Music.
www.myspace.com/mattiemossmoss
New design is generally solid, nice job. A few things I've noticed.
1) I think the new Events stuff is great (order by date puts an end to the bump-wars and makes it easy to find out what's coming up). But the problem I see with taking them out of the forum is that there's no way to find out when new comments have been added. The bulk of the conversation on the forum has historically happened around events -- I think taking away the ability to see a list of the event threads with new posts will really stifle the overall activity on the board. IMO this is the biggest risk in the new design. I don't think this needs to be in the Forum, but there should definitely be a way to quickly see a list of which events have new comments.
2) There's a bug with the marking as read / new indicators. I can't get them to clear, Production & Performance says "2 new" but when I click on it there are no new indicators on any of the threads in the forum, so I can't clear it. This might be limited to a quirk with my account since the other forums seem to clear okay for me.
3) The new indicator is too visually similar to the other text on the forum view (i.e. last poster name, name of topic). Ideally the new indicator should stand out a bit more from the page so that you can quickly locate and navigate to new content. I thought the old forum's little red image on the left was effective. The left column is also easier to visually scan than the center column.
4) There's a bug with the top dropdown Event Calendar link. It links to http://blipswitch.net/event/calendar instead of the month view http://blipswitch.net/event/calendar/2009-01. I have to manually click the word Month to actually see the calendar.
5) Is "watch this topic for replies" gone? No more email notifications? Those can be very useful.
6) Totally up to you, but maybe put Events before Audio in the top nav, since it's primarily an Events-focused site. Audio is secondary.
7) Are ratings supposed to be for before the event or after the event? Honestly I can't see them being very useful before events happen -- seems like everyone will just vote all 5s on the events that they're promoting or playing at (basically what happens with the bumping in the old forum).
All in all though, stuff looks good. Cheers.
http://www.house-heads.com
Ok, thanks for your input. Most of the things that you guys mentioned are on my to-do list. I'll probably be doing updates every week, so you won't see most of these changes implemented immediately, but I will definitely get around to them.
Your input is important. I didn't get a whole lot of feedback about the new design before so it is good to be hearing your thoughts now.
As for missing the old site...sorry :(
I'm trying to make Blipswitch have the best user experience that it can. This is still a message board at heart, and I'll try to make sure that everyone still enjoys using it. Bear with me while I iron out kinks.
Sean Knight
www.blipswitch.net
sean@blipswitch.net
+ 1. well put, mcslee.
Sean, I think your first priority should be to include a way for us to clear out all of the old postings that still show up as new. The new posts are what keeps me coming back to Blip daily.... you know, it's sorta like a soap opera. ;-)
Ok, yeah I have made some changes to the forum and added back in most of the functionality from the old board.
Sean Knight
www.blipswitch.net
sean@blipswitch.net
Also, I've decided to remove the ratings from the events. There will still be a sidebar list of "Popular Events" but these events will be ordered by comment count and not the rating (ie: stars).
This way events that are heavily discussed will have some kind of ranking over other events, but these popular events won't be the focal point like they were on the old board (ie: people over-bumping their own threads).
Sean Knight
www.blipswitch.net
sean@blipswitch.net
Some of this may be redundant, but just wanted to drop a few more comments after a week or so of driving around on the new site and getting a better sense of how it works. Sorry if this is long/annoying, hopefully it helps.
1) The lack of an Events forum seems to be really hurting overall activity the site. I notice significantly less new activity on the forum whenever I come back now, and in turn I visit less. I've gone and clicked through to a few event postings, and it seems like most events are getting fewer comments than they would have in the past. Blipswitch just feels a bit emptier to me now than it used to.
There is a chicken-and-egg problem which makes it tough to find out about new events. The main events page is ordered by upcoming date. If a new event is announced, it won't show up on the front page. The "Popular Events" is sorted by comments, but it's tough for newly added events to crawl up there, because people won't see them on the main page. You have to specifically navigate to the Events page to notice this section in the sidebar. The forum solved this because the Events would be marked as new, regardless of the event date. I used to have a better sense of what big parties are coming up in 2-3 weeks, because I'd have seen them pop up on the board.
2) The audio player is nice for tracks, but download links would be much better. I don't think anyone really enjoys listening to hour-long mixes in a web browser.
3) The general issue with splitting audio/events/forum into distinct sections is that there are simply too many places to check for new content. To find mixes, I have to check both Audio and the Mixes/Tracks Forum. People can comment on things in the Audio section, but there's no way for anyone else to find out about the new comments. To really keep up to date there are now 3 separate places to check.
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2 is pretty easy to solve. I think the solution for 1 and 3 is to keep Events/Audio as nice separate sections, but to have each new item posted to either of those categories automatically generate a forum thread. Events would go into an events forum, Audio would go into the Mixes/Tracks forum. (If people don't want to share an event or audio on the main pages, they can just post it directly to the forum.) The comment threads on the Event/Audio pages would be the same as the discussion thread.
This would keep the site usable and intuitive for both casual and frequent visitors. Casual visitors can quickly see upcoming events and new audio on the homepage, ordered neatly by time and free of all the bump-war distractions, with comments accessible by clicking on things that look interesting. The Blipswitch die-hards, on the other hand, can continue navigating directly to the Forum, where it would be possible to consume all of the new site activity in one place.
http://www.house-heads.com
^ Yeah, these are exactly the issues that I have been thinking about.
1) Basically my goal in removing the Events message board was to prevent bump-wars and to style the events more nicely. One thing I hated about the older site was that events would be pushed off the front page that were happening within a day or two. Some might say that they weren't going to be cool parties, but that was not always the case. Plus, the data is stored in the database in a more organized fashion, which opens up more possibilities from a development perspective.
2) What if there was a column that was "Recently added events" on top of the "Popular events." That might solve the issue that you are talking about. Also, the reason why I left the mixes forum was an experiment. I had planned on removing it along with the events forum, but I was curious to see if people would use the new "Audio" section or instead revert back to the old message board to post content. At the moment people have been using the "Audio" section in place of the Mixes message board to post content.
3) Download links are coming.
4) And yeah there has been a little bit less activity, however, the site was down for about 5 days 2 weeks ago, and then we just launched a new design this week, so I'm willing to give it time for more people to comment.
Thanks for your input, I really appreciate knowing what people want and get out of this site.
can we get the calendar to work correctly?
it shows nothing.
Its still missing the bbcode helpers.
Also if you notice there is no simple method to quote the original poster. the quote button is missing.
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http://kirkwoodwest.com
sorry but this forum is still missing the bbcode helpers. i'm glad there is a quote button but this and the horizontally separated posts is makes this forum seem dry and unapproachable to me compared to others i've used.
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http://kirkwoodwest.com
quote button should be working now.
Sean Knight
www.blipswitch.net
sean@blipswitch.net