Wish List: What Would You Like to See Added to the Site?
I need some help. I’m planning a re-design of the site, and I’m looking for suggestions from all of you.
I know some of the features you’re looking for–paged comments and a working chatroom are two things that are definitely on the list.
But is there something else you are looking for that would make the site more fun and/or easier to use?
Leave your suggestions in this post!
And, Happy New Year everybody! Season 9 is going to be a blast.
Posted in American Idol
106 Responses to “Wish List: What Would You Like to See Added to the Site?”
“One thing that I would like to see is the current time somewhere on the site as I am from Australia and have no idea when a post was made.”
Welcome Aus_fan- good to see another Aussie posting!!Your comment alerted me about another idea.
On another site that I frequent- you are able to change the setting to the time in your area – so you can either leave it as is or choose to change!! Don’t know if that is possible here though MJ?
Happy New Year! I’ve missed a lot of posts, so don’t know if this was posted yet.
I’d love to see a section dedicated to sales statistics and song rankings, so we can quickly see how all of our favorite IDOLs are doing and have done historically.
Probably a tall order, but I would like it! Thanks for asking!
Yeah, I have missed this as well. The blog has really exploded over the past few years (go MJ!), and as the posting volume has increased it’s harder for me to follow the action. The recent posts sidebar did help bring attention to threads that might have been pushed off the front page, and also to get a sense of where people are hanging out without having to keep track of post numbers for a bunch of different threads. Along those same lines, I will echo the request for a good search function that would make it easy to find posts by keyword/phrase or by poster. TWoP’s would be a good model. But I do like the idea of being able to easily find all the posts by a certain user – there are a lot of threads that I never venture into, but there are certain posters who I enjoy reading regardless of the topic.
I also agree with Eileen99 that a dedicated area of the blog for the numbery talk might be helpful. Kirsten’s Monday/Wednesday threads are getting a lot more traffic now, but on other days of the weeks the chatter bleeds over into headlines or elsewhere and it’s hard to maintain a sustained discussion. I also think a glossary/FAQ might be really beneficial for the chart watchers. There are so many acronyms and jargon and rules and idiosyncrasies associated with the numbers, and I’ll admit it gets tiring to read and answer the same questions week after week and season after season. There’s a lot of accumulated knowledge in this community, and I firmly believe that an educated and informed fan is a much stronger fan. It would be great to develop some sort of knowledge base that carries over year to year – it could include historical charts, links to stuff like AllAcess and HDD and the iTunes feeds, explanations of the various resources that we use (SoundScan and BDS and Mediabase), etc.
Good luck with the redesign MJ, and thanks for fueling my Idol obsession for the past three or four years. Even when I’m not posting actively, this is always my first and most frequent place for flybys to get a pulse on the Idolsphere. You’re a rockstar.
Oh, can’t edit but forgot to add…a sidebar feed of all Idol tweets (like what Brian Mansfield has at Idol Chatter) might be a nice feature, or perhaps a weekly thread dedicated to Twitter news. Seems like now that more Idols are using Twitter actively, the headline threads are the repository for even the most mundane of tweets. I guess if you go with the suggestion upthread of maintaining running threads for each contestant (even those with no major current news), those could be a good place for Twitter updates to be posted too.
As long as chat works again, I’m good.
I’m pretty easy to please as far as blog design and layout goes!
I’ll add my 2 cents in for a stronger search function, numbered posts, and a “return to last post read” function that allows you to start in a thread from where you left off the last time you visited it.
Love the idea of some standard threads (numbers, videos, twitter) to keep the headlines thread from being a catch all.
In regard to PMing, message boards etc, I would be a little cautious of adding features that facilitate this site being used as a de facto fan site. One of the things that makes MJs unique is that MJ works hard at keeping it an open, friendly forum where everyone can feel comfortable visiting and posting. Forums with PM functions seem to tend to devolve into fan based cliques where a lot of the action is going on behind the scenes. IMHO, YMMV etc.