[Theforum] New feature suggestions

rudy r937 at interlog.com
Sat Nov 10 16:02:56 CST 2001


> 1) Shouldn't we have a "notify me when a new article is posted"
> feature for www.evolt.org? Yes, I know it's posted on thelist, but
> still...  It would drive more traffic to the site.

hey madhu, thanks for all the contributions

man, are you prolific or what

think about the notification for a sec -- to whom would it be sent?  list
subscribers, right?  what better way than one email to thelist?  would you
rather that we email all site registered users?  I imagine that would
be a smaller set of people than thelist subscribers, and as for individual
emails, i don't see the point...

>2) I'd like some way of posting requests for articles on a specific topic.
>None of us are mindreaders, so we won't have any clue when a significant
>number of people want an article explaining something like, say, XHTML
>(example only). A mechanism to post requests for articles would be nice. I
>see a "Suggestions" category, but that seems to be for site features.

suggestions category is for suggestions, we place no restrictions on what
kind

thelist has also seen many such suggestions for articles

i won't even go into the aborted "Answer This" category  (don't ask)

my personal opinion is that the problem is not in how to communicate the
desire for the article, but in motivating potential authors to write it --
and the best vehicle for this, again speaking just for myself, is comments
on thelist

> Also, this opens up a new avenue for collaboration on articles. If
someone
> says, "I'd like an article on [xyz]", then member A and member B, who are
> both knowledgeable about [xyz], could co-author the article. A would
> simply ask B, "hey, want to work on this together?". Two heads are better
> than one, etc.

you betcha

even though co-authoring presents a minor problem (at the moment only one
author is associated with each article) this is still a good idea...

... although we're back to figuring out how to motivate...


rudy






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