possible jforum future features

[paul wheaton]

I've been using reddit a fair amount lately. Recently, I parted with $30 to become a reddit gold member. And with that there are extra features. Pretty fun. And I get the impression that there will be lots of new gold features soon and I'm looking forward to that.

And then as I was using javaranch, I had a couple of thoughts on things I would like to see/do. But is it just nuttiness on my part? Would others be interested? As the idea is fleshed out, would a staff member get jazzed and actually implement it? Well, it sure as hell isn't going to happen if I don't ever talk about it.

So I am gonna attempt to give each idea a unique number and ask everybody to share what they think.

371) JavaRanch gold. Or, maybe, "JavaRanch fancy pants". This item is just about the general idea of having more features for people that pay a premium. We could start with a hidden forum for fancy pants folks only. And, any funds collected in this space could go only to site improvements - not to site maintenance. If we get something like a thousand bucks down this path, maybe we'll get swag for developers. If we get $50,000 then we'll get swag and we might even contract out slices of dev work.

372) I would like to be able to make user notes. I want to be able to mark a user account with something like "I think this guy might make a good bartender" or "I think this guy might make a good sheriff" or "this guy once pissed me off and is now on thin ice with me." or some other notes so that when I see that name pop up again, I'm not relying on my feeble memory. Only I can see the notes that I make. I think this would be a feature for all users - you can make notes on my account "this guy is a real jerk - but he owns the site, so don't say it to his face" and nobody sees that note except you (and anybody doing maintenance on the database).

373) I wonder if we should enhance our profile pages to have more stuff. Be richer. I'm not sure how, but maybe people have ideas in this space. Ideas could be 373.1, 373.2, etc.

More ideas?

[Janeice DelVecchio]

Ahhhh.... a Saloon VIP room. For Ranchers who wanna live the life of a rockstar. Awesome Idea!

As for profile information, links to facebook pages, twitter, linkedin, etc might be nice. Oh, and maybe an area for folks to put their certifications.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

We already have twitter in the profile. Or do you mean displaying it somewhere else?

[Collin Dugas]

What about monetizing the jobs offered forum? I am sure with the popularity and the page hits that we receive there will be a good enough market for it.

This will add credibility to the postings as well.

[David O'Meara]

372) User notes.
I like this, but it would be handy if it was slightly richer so that it could include links eg this person annoyed me here, or I love this reply. Maybe some other features for highlighting users or user features. If linked to 373 I'd include the twitter or facebook status for selected people in the left margin.

371) Fancy Pants
I like this too, and I see this possibly relating to something else we've discussed before: allowing threads to live in multiple forums at a time. If we had both, then we could have a forum for gold members and staff, and while gold members may not be able to post to the forum directly (or maybe they can) but any topic they create in other forums automatically gets placed in this forum too with the hope that it gets seen by other gold members and staff sooner.

[Janeice DelVecchio]

What I hope the "Fancy Pants" stuff doesn't turn into:
Sites like expert exchange where you can see the whole thread except the solution without paying.


Jeanne, as for the twitter thing, I was just listing stuff. Probably should have looked to see if the fratures were available.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Janeice DelVecchio wrote:What I hope the "Fancy Pants" stuff doesn't turn into:
Sites like expert exchange where you can see the whole thread except the solution without paying.

I think that would completely go against the spirit of this site.

As an aside, you actually can see the solution if you scroll down all the way to the bottom. But it is a pain.

[paul wheaton]

Janeice DelVecchio wrote:What I hope the "Fancy Pants" stuff doesn't turn into:
Sites like expert exchange where you can see the whole thread except the solution without paying.

I don't wanna ever do that either.

[David O'Meara]

That site makes me wish I could configure Google to exclude specific domains.