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I think that getting email notifications of replies to messages is nice. It would be nice to know every time someone posts to a forum, too. This would be nicest to implement on the big message boards, but it would also be nice, say, for an author to get a notification any time someone posted a message on a thread attached to his/her articles.
Regards,
Jeff Varszegi
EEEP! An Extensible Expression Evaluation Package
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This is on our TODO list. It requires a large upgrade to infrastructure and hardware due to the amount of messages, members and expected email volume but it will definitely be done.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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I think this would also be nice, but I'd like to see such an option off by default. Most people ask dumb enough questions and every so often they try responding to one with a dumb answer. There's currently a lot of regulars in each forum that this feature may benefit. Maybe this sounds cruel, but I live in the real world where dumb questions and answers do exist.
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
My Articles
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Actually, the more I think of it, perhaps it would be better to get RSS feeds implemented for the forums with some of the modules that indicate feedback to a particular item. It'd be less obtrusive than email.
Also, I'd rather see an option to have any replies to child messages sent to you. I could imagine that this would put more strain on the DB since you'd have to walk up the parent relationships, but it's just a thought.
Finally, speaking of RSS did you ever see my reply about changing the blog RSS titles to use the member name somewhere instead of a generic title that applies to all feeds?
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
My Articles
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Heath Stewart wrote:
Finally, speaking of RSS did you ever see my reply about changing the blog RSS titles to use the member name somewhere instead of a generic title that applies to all feeds?
Yep - this is on the TODO.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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1. Formatting control: not over just the font, as Nitron nicely suggested, but over the background and other features as well
- I hate to say this, but some people might not love the orange color. You can say "they can shove it", etc., but this and the advertising are probably hindering acceptance of the blogging features on the site.
2. The ability to point to an off-site blog
3. An indicator, to appear next to a person's name each time they post an article or message, that they have blog messages (even better: an indicator that they have fresh blog messages)
- For this one, I suggest putting a modifier into each person's little head/Bob icon to indicate whether they've posted. This wouldn't entail extra load on the site if it were a computed value in the database, updated each time someone posts an article and/or by a batch process.
4. Statistics
- Marc Clifton can probably give more input than I on this one, but it should include page hits, etc. etc.
5. The ability to prevent people from replying to a specific message, or all messages; the ability to delete others' posts as well
- I don't know if you can currently delete others' posts, but I'll test it at the first opportunity
6. More ease of input
- The input page should be more like the HTML-editor control used in the submission wizard, not just the same old textarea control that we use to post one-liners in the Lounge.
7. The ability to include pictures or files
- You should consider granting this to those of high status, as an incentive and reward.
8. Less linearity
- Right now, if I enter something in my blog and lots of people reply to it, the replies will shove my previous blog entries off the page. Not only is there no facility for categorizing and otherwise organizing your blog entries, the comments should be linked to off-page, or at least that configuration option should be offered. This is common to see in blogs.
Regards,
Jeff Varszegi
EEEP! An Extensible Expression Evaluation Package
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Jeff Varszegi wrote:
- I hate to say this, but some people might not love the orange color. You can say "they can shove it", etc., but this and the advertising are probably hindering acceptance of the blogging features on the site.
Um. Isn't the blogs just an extension of CodeProject, surely these things are part of the CP brand. It's not as if we are being charged for the blog feature.
Jeff Varszegi wrote:
The ability to point to an off-site blog
Not sure what use this would be.
Jeff Varszegi wrote:
3. An indicator, to appear next to a person's name each time they post an article or message, that they have blog messages (even better: an indicator that they have fresh blog messages)
Good idea, or at least have a visual indicator that the user has a blog. It would save me having to click throught one million+ users to find who is using the blog feature. 
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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Jeff Varszegi wrote:
- I hate to say this, but some people might not love the orange color. You can say "they can shove it", etc., but this and the advertising are probably hindering acceptance of the blogging features on the site.
Um. Isn't the blogs just an extension of CodeProject, surely these things are part of the CP brand. It's not as if we are being charged for the blog feature.
It's obvious that some of the folks at CP regard it as a "brand", and I'm sure they'd agree with you. I think of it as an "online community". Your comment illustrates what I'm talking about: the attitude that these "blogs" are free, so we'd better be happy with what we get. Well, the less nice the features here are, the less people will use them. It has nothing to do with whether people like me or my advice, but there are inescapable facts. If other sites make it much easier to have a high-quality blog, people will blog there; ask Marc Clifton, CPian extraordinaire.
Jeff Varszegi wrote:
The ability to point to an off-site blog
Not sure what use this would be.
You'd be able to see that someone had an off-site blog. (That's not obvious???) Many bloggers on CP already have active offsite blogs.
Regards,
Jeff Varszegi
EEEP! An Extensible Expression Evaluation Package
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Jeff Varszegi wrote:
Your comment illustrates what I'm talking about: the attitude that these "blogs" are free, so we'd better be happy with what we get. Well, the less nice the features here are, the less people will use them.
Well, it was the comment about the advertising that threw me. CP has to pay for it's servers and bandwidth. If the adverts were removed (if that is what you mean), then that is less impressions for the marketing team to sell.
Jeff Varszegi wrote:
If other sites make it much easier to have a high-quality blog, people will blog there; ask Marc Clifton, CPian extraordinaire.
Um, doesn't Marc blog on his own hosted site running off his own server?
Jeff Varszegi wrote:
You'd be able to see that someone had an off-site blog. (That's not obvious???) Many bloggers on CP already have active offsite blogs.
I'm just not sure what's in it for the CP team if links take people away from the CP site. Apart from possibly an increase in PageRank for reciprocal links.
Michael
CP Blog [^]
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CP doesn't have to shove ads from its "partners" in your face when you're reading someone's personal pages. I understand advertising very well. I think that CP would probably see a better rate of uptake on the "blogging" feature if the person's content weren't tightly bracketed by the advertising and links to the message boards. If they did away with the unneeded links on the left side of the page, they'd have enough room to provide more features that people associate with blogs.
Again, your attitude is that CP shouldn't do anything that doesn't directly increase its revenue. I'm looking at the blogging feature as a free gift to the members, to make it more attractive to become an active member of the site. More active, happy members means more revenue. Instead of thinking about things from the perspective of how to place more ads on more pages, designers of sites like Yahoo design things to hook people into revisiting the site, then they think about revenue. Amazon.com didn't show a profit for its first several years of operation, and it was all part of the business plan; the management team was focused on growing a viable community to keep people coming back.
Also, don't make it sound like CP is a non-profit organization struggling to make ends meet. Their expenses on servers and bandwidth must be well-covered, or they wouldn't have had the money to hire more people and do a hardware upgrade recently. They're covered.
The strength of an online community is not the number of eyeballs it keeps glued to the screen looking at ads, and it's not the revenue streams it generates. It is the amount of decent thought given to it by its members. If you have a huge community of script kiddies, you don't have much. If you have a smaller community of, say, researchers posting well-written content for each others' benefit, you've got something better. The revenue generatable from an online community has nothing to do with the intrinsic value of the community, but attempts to generate revenue have made online communities fail in the past.
I'm just not sure what's in it for the CP team if links take people away from the CP site. Apart from possibly an increase in PageRank for reciprocal links.
Again, you're not thinking of it from a user-friendly perspective. Someone's free to put a little link to their blog right in their signature anyway, the way they're free to link to offline sites at will. I do it all the time.
Regards,
Jeff Varszegi
EEEP! An Extensible Expression Evaluation Package
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Interesting suggestion. Marcie has put together a bunch of ideas as well and we'll combine them all and come up with something that makes life a little easier for bloggers and bloggees.
Thanks Jeff.
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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9. Using the member name for the RSS title instead of "The Code Project Blog entries" for all members.
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
My Articles
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Jeff Varszegi wrote:
7. The ability to include pictures or files
Platinum members already can. I think Chris choose correctly since space is money and one cannot simply ascend to Platinum status like they can for bronze (way too simple, IMO), silver, or gold.
Microsoft MVP, Visual C#
My Articles
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way too simple
You bring up an interesting point. I'm thinking that change is inevitable-- if a couple years from now there are over a million Gold members, it'll be time for a change, or maybe sooner. Statuses could always be branched into new metals, I guess.
I think that there should probably be status accrued by virtue of helping people (in which case you'd probably have Plutonium status). If someone is helped, they could grant their helper some kind of points that would feed into their status. Then articles could count a certain amount of the same type of points, also; this could even depend on their popularity.
I think it's already good that messages count towards status, but I think that maybe helpful messages on help boards should count more than average. Or maybe high-ranked messages of any type could count more, but that'd be a lot of computation, and messages can always be voted up or down, and you wouldn't want a constantly fluctuating number.
Regards,
Jeff Varszegi
EEEP! An Extensible Expression Evaluation Package
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Hey CP admins, I have a suggestion:
Why are there only that few forums?
When I have to ask a specific question then I always post it to Visual C++ although it is not really the right one to post at.
What about a special forum for Math, software design question, API questions and so on... things that doesn't have to do with a programming language!
Thanks for you attention.
Greets,
Alex
Don't try it, just do it!
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these things can be posted into Genral Discussions...
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Alexander M. wrote:
What about a special forum for Math, software design question
a math & data structures & algorithms forum can be a great idaea.
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Some good ideas - thanks!
cheers,
Chris Maunder
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Don't try it, just do it!
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Would'nt be nice to have a Game Programming area. 
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I also think so, but a better site for game is gamedev.net
Don't try it, just do it!
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