Ab's New Year Resolutions

[AB Editor]

Happy New Year Everyone!

I hope we're all feeling refreshed and ready to face the great sparkling potential of 2014.

I've not made any resolutions this year - not yet anyway.

I wondered if you'd like to make some for me, and the site in the general.

What direction would you like the site to go in over the next year?

What do you think we could do better over the next 12 months?

What's missing from AB?

Any suggestions and ideas welcome, as long as you're not too rude about it :)

[jeffa]

"I don't know actually AOG - they used to, didn't they?"

No they didn't. Spell checking works on &lgt;textarea> controls, not &lgt;input... /> controls:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTML/Controlling_spell_checking_in_HTML_forms

[China Doll]

I really don't want to see a lot of 'like', 'dislike' type buttons appearing... either enter in to the thread or just read it and be done with it; this isn't FB and I couldn't care less whether people liked or disliked a post particularly.

[CokeTulip]

Happy New Year Ed -Thanks for asking

Subsections to topics often get ignored - and some topics are infrequently visited. (AB seems to attract an audience very interested in some topics and not so much in others but I dont know why this is).

Questions dont always get seen in some subsections - you can be more specific but then it doesn't always get viewed so I think ineffective in parts.

I would prefer to see poster details by the avetar next to the post - the length of time a member and if male or female.

I visited the site in the past (not too distant) - I thought there was some bullying and unkind stuff going on (bad sometimes) with no action despite rules! and I didn't want to be part of it. An improvement then became very obvious so I reconsidered. I'm still pretty new.

New members may be put off staying as you have very long term members, this is great but may be a bit daunting for new members if staying and particularly younger age grs - I think people sometimes use the site to "ask a question and go" and for those who want to "bed in", it is harder as the chat often dominates between those who know eachother pretty well (understandable). It takes time. I guess its the same for other established sites - just saying. I expect you want people to stay.

AB is a very supportive, fun and helpful site and it has some fantastic ABers and it is a community for some but you wouldnt get this impression straight off - its more than an answer bank and its good - and it might be good to get that across (It realise a few members are barking!)

I notice ABers leaving messages for other people all the time - would it be good to facilitate this (through Avetar) rather than them having to attract the person's attention in the question box?

[jno]

CokeTulip, some of those FAO threads are just private messages, but a lot are also matters for public discussion ("FAO Sqad, my left leg has fallen off").

There used to be a PM facility, but it was abandoned, I don't know why; possibly because it essentially took people off site.

[Prudie]

Firstly I've been occasionally spying in for the last couple of weeks and have to say this is the first thread that I personally have found interesting so thanks.

This is primarily a Q&A site so the requests for PMs, like buttons, more personal info etc defeats its objective IMO, there's already too much exclusivity going on and certainly think the requests to shove the puzzlers off elsewhere is cheeky.

I would like the preview back, it was available when I first joined. For some reason typos are more visible, must be a brain thing.

[China Doll]

I agree very much with Prudie - it's already easily possible to make friends with AB members and I really don't want to see any similar features to social networks as Prudie describes.

[ludwig]

I only read the first few posts, but there was a suggestion that the mods should be able to edit people posts. I'd like to go on record to say what a fLIPPING FANTANTASIC idea this is, and that I've never heard such a self evidently FLIPPING BRILLIANT idea in all my life. Whichever fucGENIUS came up with that should hang their head in PRIDE.

[Answerprancer]

My new year's resolution is 1280X1024 :-)

[Zeuhl]

Prancer

Are you pixelated?

[AB Editor]

Jeffa: Has that always been the case in Chrome as well? It might also be that we used a different kind of input field in the past? Regardless, it's a bit out of our hands!

China Doll: The thing with adding some social bits in is that it might remove some of the less serious nonsense from the open parts of the site (which others have suggested is a bit annoying and "excluding").

CokeTulip: We'd like to work out how to hold on to new visitors better too. We do get quick a good "sticking rate" - but I don't know if I personally would have the stamina or patience to join the social/chatty aspects of the site completely afresh. Again, a problem of exclusion.

We do need to sell ourselves better for the soft stuff I suppose!

Prudie: There's a good thread on WW1 in News at the moment. I'd love to see more threads of that quality.

Puzzlers will always be at the heart of AB - no need to worry about the exclusion of them!

We'd like to find a way to make it better place for Q&P members - but it's so quick moving I've never been able to keep hold of a discussion :)

Ludwig :)

[bibblebub]

How about completely doing away with sub-topics? Make the most popular of the current sub-topics into top-level topics in their right and do away with the rest so that the list on the lhs shows all of them by default, no longer any need for clicking on Topics to see others.

[Robinia]

Good idea bibblebub

[anneasquith]

I agree. re sub topics.

[AB Editor]

Yep, it's not a bad idea.

[China Doll]

You won't though... then they'll just be discussions about who likes whos thread and blah, blah, blah... I really don't think that will stop.

[AB Editor]

"You won't though... then they'll just be discussions about who likes whos thread and blah, blah, blah... I really don't think that will stop."

No, it won't, but it might get put "out of the way"? :)

[bibblebub]

make the search box more prominent even if it's simply putting in something like Enter search terms here as ghost text (or whatever the term is for text that disappears as soon as someone starts typing into the box)

[anotheoldgit]

AB Editor

/// I think we'd have to address that question to Mozilla and Google as the spell-checker is built into their browsers, and not AB itself. ///

Yes but is only in AnswerBank' title bar that they fail to work, they work perfectly well in the full text window.

[boxtops]

I can't see the point of putting ABers' details next to a post, as coke suggests - we already know that people's genders are not always correct, and when they joined (unless it's today) is less relevant - we know some spammers/trolls joined years ago, and lie in wait until they need to active another user name.

[AB Editor]

"Yes but is only in AnswerBank' title bar that they fail to work, they work perfectly well in the full text window."

What Jeffa has pointed out above is that all text entry areas of that type, across the internet, will not have spell check present in them in Firefox/Chrome.