First, I think the forum here is really good from a social point of view; people are really helpful and well-behaved compared to many other forums I've seen. With that said, I have a few forum itches I'd like to scratch, and some random ideas that might be of interest to other people. These are lower on the priority list, but I think they would be totally awesome.

-- When you create a thread, have "email replies" checked by default. Or, slightly fancier, maybe it could remember what you did last time you created a thread and use that as the default.

-- When we use the @userid notation, send a notification to that user. Probably would need to be configurable as an option as some people won't want that kind of email.

-- Make each person's userid/avatar a link to a basic profile page. Since people are constantly changing avatar images, it'd be nice to allow us to provide a little bit of extra information. You'd have to get each user's permission to display this stuff, of course. One problem I have is that it's often not obvious what gender a user is; you can sometimes guess from the name or the image, but this is not 100% by any means. Maybe we could also have links to our blogs, twitter, etc. Eventually the profile pages could show our stats, and that could go together with the long-awaited leaderboard project.

-- Provide a convenient way to find all posts and comments by a particular user. As it is now you can search by userid but this is not super obvious.

-- Allow people to "like" comments. We currently do this informally with "+1" but this could be made easier with a "like" link.

-- Allow certain forum threads to be made "sticky", or maybe have a separate list of "recommended reading" threads somewhere. I think there was an old thread about an HSK success story that we discussed recently; it would be nice to be able to highlight threads like that, and maybe some of the threads that cover some of the frequent questions that keep coming up.

Other people please chime in, especially if you have a different idea...

James

The "sticky" idea is common in other forums and wouldn't take long to implement.

Instead of having the topics sorted by date created, sort them by the recent comments. Or at least have different ways to sort them.

I really hate piling work on these guys, because Skritter is still a fairly small operation, but all of jww's ideas sound pretty awesome. I like #3, #5, and #6 the best. It'd be nice to know a little more info about our fellow Skritterlings (at least the vocal ones on this forum) just to keep it feeling like a fairly well-balanced community.

Some good ideas though our dev list, as always, is a mile long with many more pressing items. Items that would be sticky should, I think, be highlighted via the FAQ, a blog post, the newsletter, etc. and anything that says "read this first" means that it'll take longer for new users (we'd rather answer the same question twice than annoy our users - if it annoys us enough it'll be a good sign that we need to change something to explain things better).

For the "like" button were you thinking in-forum "like" functionality, or link-to-Facebook's "like" (or both, with two separate buttons?)

Sort-order by date created is so that discussions stay fresher (year-old threads don't get "bumped"). This post gives some good background for those interested: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html (though, in our case I think the people who post the most contribute the most).

@Doug That's why I prefaced my comments with "these are lower on the priority list". I'm a programmer and I personally like to see feature requests because they give me an idea of what the users are interested in, and some high-impact things can sometimes be done relatively easily if you know that people would like to see them.

Regarding "sticky" threads, I was thinking about the FAQ as well, but the thread I was referring to doesn't really fit as a FAQ and is more of a success story (was it ximeng? I already forgot). I would imagine that kind of good press would be very helpful to you guys. I think classic old threads like that that are worth a look would probably be better served by a "recommended reading" section, but not in the sense of "read this first" as they are sometimes quite long and repetitive. Anything that new users have to read should be condensed and pithified for their benefit.

Regarding the "like" button, I'm not sure what you meant by the Facebook link; I was imagining there would be a little link near each post saying "Like" and the current number of "likes" received. When you click "Like" it would change to "Stop liking" or whatever corruption of the English language would be appropriate. This mechanism could also potentially be used to determine which threads go into the "recommended reading" section - the sum of all the likes of all the comments would be the "like" score for the forum topic as a whole, and then you could sort by "liked".

I've read that Joel Spolsky article before, I have met him in person, I have read a fair amount of his stuff thanks to the influence of some friends, and I have to admit that I don't generally find him that impressive a thinker. His worries about adding the "email me when someone replies" and "sort by recent replies" features seem not to have materialized in the case of this forum.

@icecream You can already sort by "updated" if you click on where it says "Created" at the top of the list of forum posts. Maybe this should be made more visually obvious?

James

James, excellent feedback as always. A recommended readings section with success stories, why does Skritter do X in Y way, and maybe learning tips sounds like a good idea.

When I think like, I think of the little Facebook button that's been cropping up all over the web (when you hit it, the number of "likes" for an article is increased and your Facebook news stream says "Doug likes the story 'US students learning more Chinese'" or some such). What you envision should be fairly easy to implement (though of course it would add another button to the UI).