LUGNET Wish Lists
I’ve compiled wish lists for new LUGNET features based on online discussion. I’ve also set a rough priority for the items based on importance and feasibility in my view - but am happy to hear others’ input on changing the priority of these items.
Tim Courtney - tim (at) timcourtney (dot) net
New LUGNET Homepage
Reference
Wish List
- New User orientation area that guides them to resources and web sites based on their desired activity. Example: “I want to: Buy or Sell LEGO Parts/Sets” would include a brief description of BrickLink link there.
- New User guide to LUGNET posting and membership.
- Quick Login module for members.
- Blog-like News Article feature that allows people to write articles for LUGNET’s main page. Similar to BZPower. RSS-like feeds from other sites, but also allow users to filter out what sites they see feeds for in their account preferences.
- Return of CLSotW.
- Poll module, with entertaining weekly poll.
- Featured model of the undetermined period of time. Set up a curator for this and allow them to change the model at will, versus a hard-planned timeframe for the feature. Or, a curator picks a few models and puts them in a pool and the server chooses one randomly at each page load.
- Slightly re-work outside links where they appear (post).
- Lower priority to the Top Stories (news.lugnet.com) module on the www.lugnet.com homepage.
- Multiple language support.
Design Considerations
- Fast loading page, <50k.
- CSS-driven, without nested tables. Make sure this is cross-browser compatible, and also doesn’t break in old browsers. (notes)
- Very light images.
- No “logo-fest,” on the main page, refrain from the mosaic of site logos that appears almost everywhere else.
- Avoid JavaScript.
- Re-evaluate branding of “LUGNET News” to something that reflects “discussion groups,” while maintaining the NNTP gateway. This will be more new user-friendly.
LUGNET Features
These feature ideas are LUGNET-wide, not simply relevant to the new homepage design.
- Community-created help pages with support for multiple languages (based on volunteer translators).
- Ability to track read and unread posts via member accounts.
- Ability to track replies to your own posts.
- Option to toggle on dots for >100-post threads.
- Calendar-like interface for news group posts so posts can be tracked by day. http://www.bricklink.com/calendar.asp?v=F. An extension of the LUGNET Traffic page.
- Update http://www.lugnet.com/links/, perhaps using a database so members can update their own URLs.
- Interactive event calendar (per WorldLUG scope).
- Hit counter displayed for each post via the web interface, “This post has been viewed X times.“
- Clean up http://www.lugnet.com/people/members/ to display each letter of alphabet as separate page, versus one large page.
- Index of all user-created FTX pages on LUGNET.
Newsgroup features from Matthew Miller (post):
- Display identity-images (avatars, or whatever) by each post (in various sizes in the different views.
- Track read/unread articles in depth:
* interface to show just unread, just read, or a mix (perhaps show just unread in the page view, but have all articles in the thread dots)
* interface to mark posts and groups and ranges as read/unread
* different colors for read/unread in the dot view
* list of subscribed groups with unread posts
* “inbox” of all new messages from subscribed groups (this might be a good place to highlight posts which are replies to your own)
- Ability to create private newsgroups (or at least web groups and mailing lists, initially)
- Strip out FTX (or rather, pretty-print) when displaying via NNTP
- Put the lugnet.com (or .org) URL of each post in the headers of each message -- nice for utilizing the best of both interfaces
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