With the article draft system complete, on what should the OmniNerd development team focus next?

Aside from just voting on what you'd like to see, it'd help me out if there were specific details you'd like to see pertaining to your vote choice. Otherwise, I'll just make it all up.

Improving the news submission / revision system is what I voted for, and here's why:

1. The system as it stands is something I wrote over about 2 days in a coffee shop back in February. Back then my goal was simple: get something up, regardless of how user-friendly it is. If you've submitted news, you've probably seen that it could use some work.

2. The system allows moderators to send notes to a writer, but the writer can't do the same. So if the mod makes a style critique, the writer has no way of explaining to the editor that he/she may not want to make that change.

3. The only notification is through email. I think it'd be nice that when you had news pending, another box displays, perhaps under the recent articles and before the news that give you a status like: " You have one news submission pending review by markmcb." Or, "Your news submission has been accepted pending minor corrections: edit your news post." ...this could be as detailed as we want.

4. Allow moderators to make changes to titles. The way I see it is the news post is yours, the title is ours. The submitted title is merely a suggestion.

5. Leave all edits to the actual news up to the writer, moderators can not make any changes.

...that's just off the top of my head. I'd love to hear your suggestions. Even if the poll shows that the users want something else, this and all the listed options will eventually come to be, so please provide any feedback that you may have.

I voted for the comment viewing system because it's the thing that is most frustrating for me as I scour O-nerd. Especially in the long and involved conversations, if you reply to a comment that was made much earlier in the thread, it appears at the end of the thread away from the comment to which it is directly related. The preference to collapse all comments below a certain tier level helps some, but it would be nice if all comments were collapsible.

I realize that fully collapsible comments could result in an unacceptable server load (or some other issue), so maybe a solution could be worked out where the comments are only collapsible when it is necessary. Maybe an option to give the user manual control of the tier level that displays. That way someone happening upon a confusing or very branched thread could increase the displayed tiers one level at a time to better follow the conversation. They could read the first comment, click to open all of the second tier comments and read those, then click to the next tier, etc.

As this would only be necessary in particular conversations (like this one), maybe it would be an option that popped up on the comment screen when a certain number of comments was reached. This would be a good temporary solution, but it would be unnecessary in some cases (where there are lots of comments, but the progress linearly without branches). Maybe a more permanent solution would be an algorithm that was able to determine the complexity of the thread and pop up the option to make the page "collapsible" when a certain complexity is reached.

Of course, it would have to have a flippin sweet name, too. Perhaps the button could say "I'm Sablotroned" or "My face is melted," signifying the readers inability to follow all that is O-nerd...

An interactive read list. Allow readers to submit titles they have read, with a short description of content, and allow members to score the book based on importance, joy of reading, or historical relevance. Right now, I'm reading things off my amazon.com recommended list, which, while interesting, doesn't allow me to broaden my horizons as much as I'd like. The problem I can see with this is that the list will become gargantuan in a few short weeks, so a cataloging system might be complicated.

I'm still waiting to see the "virtual library like Doom without the evil folks" that milhous suggested five months ago!

How about focusing on a bottle of good red (I recommend Chilean vineyards) vine? You guys deserve it.

I think the next focus area should be improving MS Internet Explorer. Everytime there seems to be a formatting problem on this site, the problem ends up being with my browser, not the site. The Army won't allow me to switch. Therefore, I think we should put all of our effort into making MSIE O-Nerd compliant. All those in favor...?

I voted other, and to be honest it was because I like all of those ideas.

1. O-markup - I've found myself more then once wishing I had more tags to use in comments for emphasis, hence getting O-markup to comments would be a dream. I don't however see much use for them in the news submission area, because it's a fairly straight forward piece of writing.

2. For the comment viewing system - I'd really like to see a way for the site to log all comments viewed by a specific user and be able to track them. That way, much like a forum, you can see what comments you have not yet read. Although the current comment system is pretty good at keeping track of conversations, sometimes they can get a bit hard to follow, especially when we get up to 15-20 comments. Of course this list of non-viewed comments could also be run through the comment scoring filter so that crappy scores aren't shown.

3. Article Draft System - this is where using O-markup should really shine, as this is usually a professional level document, so the more options available to a competent writer the better.

4. News Submission/Revision System - The only difference that I would do here is add some sort of field to allow the article writer to add comments to the reviewer if the submission gets re-submitted to make corrections.

5. Comment Scoring - I was talking with markmb a while back about a new system for the scoring. It's slowly getting to the point where the amount of "graders" we now have won't be able to handle the comment volume. There are two options, hire someone to be some kind of full-time O-nerd grader, which won't happen, or broaden the amount of people that make scores. The idea I was "pitching" to markmcb was to have a scoring system that allows everyone above a certain nerd rank to make scores. This would actually become a branch of the much-talked about O-nerd equation.

When someone submits a comment, there will be a pre-determined time that the article can be graded, maybe 3 or 4 days. During this time, anyone above this pre-determined NR can place their grade on it and it holds a rank of "ungraded". At the end of the alloted time period, those grades are factored, with a weight that is based on the NR of the grader, and the bottom and top are thrown out to account for personal grudges and people that are just spiteful. This way it doesn't depend on any 5 or 6 people, but say, people that get their NR displayed in their comments, which I think is 7 and above, I'm not sure. Ungraded posts would of course go through any scoring filter just so they still get accessed.

The last step in the process is that the top say, 4 O-nerds, and this should be calculated dynamically, will be able to modify the calculated score for any comment. The reason I say calculated is that way if an owner of the site wants to maintain final say on scores, they have to keep that NR up. Also there could be a system where if any of these top 4 change, the new grader, as well as the old grader get an email or something letting them know of their new status.

Just to keep the programming side of it simple, someone's comment weight would be calculated and assigned to them based on their NR and stored somewhere in the DB. The equation to determine the average score would kick out the highest and lowest post-weight scores, then average them.

6. Poll Submission System - This would be a definite plus, and I think the formatting for it would be pretty straight forward, a very "fill in the blank" type of form.

Just the comments of a lowly NR7.

O-nerd is teh crawlz0rz today. Time for better hosting!

Maybe it would be cool to have a weekly open thread? For random thoughts and discussions outside of the news and articles?

Bah! the back-page arrow erased my whole first comment!

For me (and maybe i'm the only one) keeping up to date on omninerd is somewhat difficult. I must admit that i'm not quite up to the at-least-once-a-day commitment that seems to be required of anyone to actively participate in this site. Even the first news post ends up being "so-last-week" by the time i get to it. I'm even worse off when the post that interests me is farther down the page and already has an hour's worth of comments attached to it to read. My motivation to comment is usually undone by the thought that whatever i say will most likely go unnoticed or not be pertinent. I don't expect the site to slow down, but maybe some way for slower people to keep up (other than the omninerd poll) would be good? Or, maybe there already is a way and all it needs is some bold print or red lettering or something.

Also, maybe omninerd could (for the benefit of its participants who are already trying) invent its own language for us not-vocabulary-nerds to decipher. Maybe symbols or numbers or braile or something?

I would like to be able to send private messages to other O nerds on via the web site.