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        riddles >> suggestions, help, and FAQ >> What features would you add to this site
        
(Message started by: mistaken_id on Oct 30^th, 2012, 11:08am)

Title: What features would you add to this site
Post by mistaken_id on Oct 30^th, 2012, 11:08am

If you had access to all the data of this site (forum posts, userids, answers...), what features would you add to make this site more usable.

My suggestions:
1. Allow users to upvote/downvote replies to topics, and show the reply with most upvotes.

2. Better search or discovery. This should help discover great content, and should also help in avoiding duplicate questions

Title: Re: What features would you add to this site
Post by towr on Oct 30^th, 2012, 12:34pm

on 10/30/12 at 11:08:10, mistaken_id wrote:

1. Allow users to upvote/downvote replies to topics, and show the reply with most upvotes.

I don't think that makes much sense, because many replies are only meaningful in the context of other replies that were posted before.

Anyway, I think the first step should be to abandon this forum software in lieu of something better. It's ten years old, it's perl, it's crap. It doesn't even use a database.

As for features, I kind of like the idea of using a 20-questions style search for content. It meshes nicely with the topic of the forum. But I don't really have the time to program it, and I wouldn't really want to do so in perl either.

Another much needed feature is better spam-deterrence. A few modifications for this have been added, but something smarter and more comprehensive would be nice. (E.g. duplicate detecting, flood protection, deleting spammers and every post attached to them etc.)

Title: Re: What features would you add to this site
Post by mistaken_id on Nov 1^st, 2012, 7:33pm

@Towr, replies in context of other replies should be made comments to that reply. User should write a reply, instead of a comment, only if it has enough information to answer the topic

Title: Re: What features would you add to this site
Post by mistaken_id on Nov 1^st, 2012, 7:36pm

on 10/30/12 at 12:34:51, towr wrote:

Anyway, I think the first step should be to abandon this forum software in lieu of something better. It's ten years old, it's perl, it's crap. It doesn't even use a database.

True. But this site has some really good content, which I think is very useful to bootstrap when you are building a new site. Migrating most of data, which has some good discussion, to a better datastore will be really useful.

Title: Re: What features would you add to this site
Post by mistaken_id on Nov 1^st, 2012, 7:38pm

on 10/30/12 at 12:34:51, towr wrote:

Another much needed feature is better spam-deterrence. A few modifications for this have been added, but something smarter and more comprehensive would be nice. (E.g. duplicate detecting, flood protection, deleting spammers and every post attached to them etc.)

Duplicate detecting should be solved when there is a better discovery tool. Current discovery/search tool is not good enough, and it encourages users to ask duplicate content instead of allowing them to search before asking

Few suggestions on how search can be improved:

It could be like stackoverflow / Quora, where it shows list of questions that are similar to the one user is asking.

Above system should detect most of the duplicates before they are added. And moderators can further improve the discovery tool by redirecting duplicate questions to similar questions that were asked before.

Title: Re: What features would you add to this site
Post by towr on Nov 1^st, 2012, 11:20pm

on 11/01/12 at 19:33:42, mistaken_id wrote:

@Towr, replies in context of other replies should be made comments to that reply. User should write a reply, instead of a comment, only if it has enough information to answer the topic

Yeah, that's not going to work. First of all it unnecessarily constraions people's action. Secondly, problem solving is sometimes a cooperative effort, so no reply would answer the topic by it's own, and throw-away comment might prove crucial later on.
A forum that enforced that kind of structure would a) not be a forum, b) not be a place I'd want to be.

on 11/01/12 at 19:38:12, mistaken_id wrote:

At best a good discovery tool would solve half the problem. People still ask questions that are answered by the first result on google. Having a good discovery tool on the forum will not change the fact that people are too lazy to use it and would rather cause other people unnecessary work.

Quote:

It could be like stackoverflow / Quora, where it shows list of questions that are similar to the one user is asking.

Above system should detect most of the duplicates before they are added. And moderators can further improve the discovery tool by redirecting duplicate questions to similar questions that were asked before.

This is a puzzle forum, not a questions forum. It may work for some well-known puzzles, that are phrased in nearly identical ways each time, but it wouldn't work at all for the many puzzles that exist in a hundred different guises. You can't automatically detect that.

Anyway, that wasn't what I was talking about. I was talking about spam; those aren't puzzles. I was talking about detecting that within 15 minutes a user posts nearly (or exactly) the same thing several dozen times.

Title: Re: What features would you add to this site
Post by movie4fun on Aug 18^th, 2014, 7:10pm

I would suggest cannonical url that will help the site gets more indexed in google.