List your three top small improvements!

..and by that I mean just minor things, not major backend changes like wishlists and a new author system. Because I've spent the evening reading my shelves with LTs help, and the little things are getting more and more annoying....

Mine are:

1. FIX LCC SORTING! This has gone beyond embarassing into just ...why does it still not work? It's close enough to right to be maximally confusing and render the whole thing nearly useless. Supposedly there was a working fix six months ago; it really should have been implemented that long ago. I know it's possible to pad your numbers to convince it to work, but considering that this is a cataloging site that relies heavily on LoC data, it ought to be able to *read* LoC data at least as well as your average college freshman.

2. The completely wrong "examples" on the search page. Either fix them, or get rid of them entirely and just leave the FAQ link. This is a fix that ought to take about 30 seconds, and it would greatly improve ease of use of site, especially for the new people that I keep trying to convince to show up here! One again, I'm puzzled as to why this is still broken - and no, "we're giong to change search completely! Any day now!" is not a good excuse for leaving it so utterly wrong in the meantime. ;)

3. And now that I've vented my spleen about things that are wrong, a new thing I'd like: I'd really love to be able to see my 'number of distinct tags' statistic. LT must store the number since the Zeitgeist has it, and surely it's not a big enough computational problem that it would strain the servers that much to put it on the FS page? ... surely! Actually, scratch that last one, I just ran into the other strange omission I knew I was forgetting: I'd like a link back to "all topics" from individual topic pages in Talk. Yeah, it's a minor thing easy to work around (with help of back button); it's just more of a "why not?" question. No, seriously, why not?

So ... what are your top three "I love it despite" minor grumps about LT?

Re #3 Actually, all you need to do is click on the Talk tab.

... if you were previously on one of the other settings, the talk tab is just as many clicks as any of the other ways. Not that two clicks instead of only one is, like, a major difficulty here. It's just that I keep doing a double take expecting it to be there, and it's not, and I can't figure out *why*.

...and my need to know WHY is a large part of why I'm so addicted to reading, so.

1. More columns in catalogue view! It makes no sense to me that we're losing out on functionality of the most important screen because adding more columns would make the display-editing screen look worse for some people, especially since some people already have that problem anyway.

2. Ratings above reviews (and, preferably, above recommendations) on the works page. I know a lot of people said they don't care about ratings, but there are also a lot of people who don't care about reviews. And the ratings show much more data much more quickly and in a smaller place. The rating data is constantly getting better as more people rate a certain book, while the reviews that appear first are of completely random quality. And people who are willing to put in the time to read a long review obviously don't mind a bit of scrolling, so it wouldn't hurt them if they had to move past one small box. This is my biggest pet peeve because it's something that's actually gotten much worse.

3. Dates sorting in the opposite direction first. Tim has acknowledged that most people want this, and it seems like something very straightforward to change, so I'm not sure what the delay is.

I would like the add manually button to be much higher on the page. I agree with this one - just experimented - if you drag the link onto the links bar in your browser then you can open the page from there.

1) In Safari: Post a message opens at bottom of thread (ok) but display of page jumps to top of page, which means I have to scroll down to write the message. Working fine in Firefox.

2) A link to jump to 'your ignored' threads in talk (for example to un-ignore one of them). Could also be done by a link to 'last' in addition to 'next' and 'prev'.

3) Search results in talk: have a way to sort or collapse them by thread (or by group?).

1. Author page: No bold print for "n LibraryThing users own x books by a, ..."

2. Option to set your library sort view to newest entry date (currently takes me 3 clicks: My library, sort by date, sort descending. As I log in from different computers, I cannot have a persistent cookie plus bookmark.)

3. Works page: "Find at" include search Google books.

#5 your point3) is in greyhead's FAQ HERE

I don't think there is an official answer, with the background algorithm

1) Some form of sort on search results.

2) A frequent wipe of non-authors with no books

3) Taking account of ratings in suggester et al.

1) A way to get to your ignored posts easily.

2) A way to ignore groups other than never using Your World.

3) Separate lists for private and public groups.

1) On the Author pages, fixing the missing info in "You have books by ...", which has been obviously begging to have read "You have ## books by ..." for months and months and months.

2) In the Zeitgeist, update the sub-pages more frequently ... for instance the 1000 most prolific reviewers list is at least six weeks old at this point.

3) MORE STATS! I'd love to have a "digest" of the data from the Zeitgeist on the "Fun Stats" page. Stuff like "With #### books, your library is the ###th largest of L.T." or "With ### reviews, you're the ###th most prolific reviewer on L.T." or "With an obscurity of ##/###, your library is the ###th most obscure on L.T.", or even that stuff about tags, and how about adding "With ### uploaded book images, you're the ###th cover uploader on L.T." (and a similar one for author pics for those who are into that). Little graphic "bell curve" histograms would be nice for all those too!

1. Have a date and time stamp on all zeitgeist pages.

For all I know some of these have been reported and/or solved elsewhere, but here goes:

1. Power Edit
When I edit my catalog in power edit mode, instead of being returned to the power edit page - with all my books listed - I get the front page of library thing within the frame where my catalog should be. I use Firefox on a Mac Panther. Screenshot here: http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w220/isadrone/power_edit_results.jpg

Note that when I change a book cover, I'm again redirected to the front page, instead of back to that book's record or my catalog; it's still not desireable but at least it's not within a frame.

2. Tailored Sort Orders
I'd like to be able to display a different sort order for my main catalog page (alphabetical by title) and my recently_read tag (from most recent date, descending). Note I said "display", meaning that I'd like people dropping in from my blog to by default see the sort order I'd selected for a tag.

3. More Room for Additional Authors
I like to list all the authors in anthologies, but usually can't fit them all in to the "Other Authors" field. Even when I just use last names.

(Oh, and I do like _Zoe_'s suggestion of having the ratings above the reviews.)

A couple of mine have already been mentioned, so I'm left with one VERY small improvement:

Say you want to look for an older thread on Talk, one that has now been pushed off the current page and onto an older page:

to move into the past, you click "Next".

That's simply backwards.

Now you're on an older page of Talk:

say you change your mind, and now want to move to a more recent page, you have to click on "Previous".
(Or, to move further into the past, you can click on "Next".)

Again, that' strikes me as simply backwards.
To my mind, when you're browsing a time-sorted list, "Previous" and "Next" should refer to chronology, and not to page-position.

> Taking account of ratings in suggester et al.

and be able to check 'ignore book / author for recommendations' (not that I'd count this as a small improvement)

> 15: tabebuia : I don't have the AOL browser so this may not work. But most browsers have a Toolbar on which you can place links to favourite sites or pages. In IE you need to turn this on with Tools | Toolbars | Links.

In my case this brings up the Links toolbar at the right hand edge of my screen and I have to right click and 'Unlock Toolbars' before I can drag it to a better location.

Once you have the Links Toolbar showing thatn it should be possible to drag either a page icon (the little L in the case of LibraryThing), or a link from a page onto the bar to create a shortcut for the future.

Hope this helps

I'd like to have "Your watch list" show up above "Users with your books" -- it's a much shorter list, for me.

Am I the only person that wishes our libraries were alphabetical instead of numerical? If I'm scrolling through looking for books or authors that start with S, how in the heck should I know what page it is on? I currently have over 700 books listed, I can't fathom how all those folks in the top 500 can find a range. Am I missing something? Or should I start using tags for this?

You can sort by author or title, and reverse sort, but you can't do both at once of course. ;)

As far s guessing where it is, doing a human binary sort only takes a few seconds.

'I think L is about halfway, guess halfway page." Then click one or two next to that to get to the right one.

If you wanted a way to sort things that were all books starting with S or S authors then tags would be the way to go, for sure.

You can sort your library by any of the columns. You can also search your books for the name of the author you are looking for.

I definitely think it should be possible to get to the page of books/authors starting with a particular letter with a single click. It's fine to do a human binary sort, but that takes more than a few seconds just because of page loading time.

I've only got two, but they're both annoyances I've discovered when I've been fixing covers in my library today.

One, when you select a cover, it takes you to a separate page. I'm okay with that. What I'd like is for that page to take me back to the page I was working on. This is probably more complicated to implement than it would seem to me, but it's annoying, especially when working with the higher numbered pages in my library.

Two, I have many books in storage. As I've been adding them, I tag them all with "box##", where the numbers refer to a number on the box. Books that are here are not tagged with a box notation, obviously. Short of going through and tagging each individual book that's here with a tag like "here", I'd love a way to simply say "all books without tag "box*" (where * in this case is the regular expression to match all tags beginning with the three letters box).

And that's it. I love this place, because it's so wonderfully useful, and I've been wanting to catalog my books for a long time. Now I know what I have. :)

-kat

I think this is a small request, but what do I know? :-)

I'd like to be able to view the LT Authors list in alpha order. That would make it a little easier to skim for any familiar name.

myshelves - you can view the LT Author list in alphabetical order. At the top, there's a link to choose a "sort by". It defaults to "books on LibraryThing", but the other choice is "author name".

ablachy,

Thanks. I was looking on the Zeitgeist page, and didn't click for the full list. Dumb.

Here are my three recommendations. I think that they would be pretty simple to implement, yet would go a long way in improving usability (at least for me).

1) When you click on a number in the "Users With Your Books" list on your profile page, it lists all books that you have in common with that user (with the other user's selected covers). This is, of course, very cool. When your collection has multiple copies of the same "work", however, the other user's books that correspond to that work are listed once for each of your own corresponding books. So if, for instance, after having entered my eight different translations of Don Quijote, I were to view books in common with a user who has five translations, I would see the book listed forty times (as if we had forty copies of the quijote in common?!). The program should, of course, list every book in the other user's library that corresponds with each unique work (not each book) in my collection, so that I only see the exact number of books owned by the other user. I don't know if this error exists in any of the "commonality" statistics.

2) It would be really nice if the library suggestion engine could filter a user's library using a set of user-specified tags to be included or excluded (using, say, a comma-delimited list with plus and minus sign prefixes--kind of like the method used by the search engine). This would allow the user to generate recommedations for tagged subsets of their library or--even better--to exclude subsets of their library from consideration when generating recommendations (so that the suggestions aren't dominated by topics that are not currently of interest).

3) It would be really nice if there were a new sortable, free-form text field with which users can control the sort order of their collections without being forced to enter "artificial" tags simply to control sorting. I know that secondary sorting may be in the works, but (at least in my library), I like to apply varying sort criteria. Just to give a simple example, classic works are sorted first by author's birth date, whereas the primary sort for most contemporary writing is by author name. If there were a sortable text field (called "keys" or something like that), I could list whatever I wanted to control the sort order (whether it be room-case-shelf- position, topic-region-author-year or whatever).

A cool enhancement to this third feature would be if comma-delimited lists within this field were to be tokenized during searching and then a cool number comparison routine written to recognize not only that 10 or 10th is greater than 9 or 9th, but also that fields ending in BC, BCE, etc. should be sorted in reverse order. I know, I know...wishful thinking.

I just started using your system a couple weeks ago, and I am still in the process of entering everything. However, I have noticed a couple things that should be simple improvements to implement.

1. On the Edit page, add two fields. Specifically "Series" and "Volume" (or "Vol."). I have many works of fiction that are part of a series, and it would be nice to be able to list these in view selectable field. Also, the fields could be added, and the users can fill these in if there is not an automatic mechanism already in place that can be adapted to the problem.

2. Allow the possibility of a user having multiple (but a small number) of lists. For example, one or two Book lists, a CD list, a DVD list. This would not require any major change accept in access rights. More then just books have ISBNs these days.

3. Add a way to select from the tags previous entered in your library tags to be assigned to a work. (Edit page) A small scroll window showing perhaps 5 tags at a time will work. This way, you do not have to continuously type in the same thing across potentially hundreds of works.

3a. Include a way to add tags that others have used to your library of tags, perhaps by clicking on them.

3b. Include a way (perhaps on the Profile or Add Books page) to add tags to your list without assigning them to a book yet.

And I agree with the point about having more fields in the display pages. More room than is needed is usually allotted for the titles and authors. Series and volume, if implemented, can be included in one version of the page.

#29 Gemphyre
re: entering tags... two ways, either power edit & add to the group...

or Control-C & Control-V (also known as Copy & Paste) ... that's what I use to enter & re-enter data.

29> #1. the best way to deal with this is tags. an example of how this can work is here.

One of the problems I see with a single series tag is I have books that are sub-series.

I have
Slave Ring which is part of "Clan Brujah Trilogy" which is a part of "Vampire the Masquerade" which is a section of the "World of Darkness". But with tags I can add all that information and sort things so they group and sort how I like the link above is one example how it can be done and you can look at my library for more extensive works. My tag WoD is probably my best example (order by tag).

#29, About your #3, there has been a lot of talk here about easier ways to tag, including drop-down lists, etc. It is one of my pet topics! For example, see http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php

32> your link is incomplete...

1. having a profile view counter so you can see how many people have vistied your page.

2. bring back the star ratings so they can be viewed in place of the comments as soon as you go to someone else's page

3. an email, alert, or message that could be sent to you if people in your watch list or in the top five people you share books with add new books or reviews to their pages

>34 dawnlovesbooks:: I don't really know what you mean with #2. You can arrange the columns however you want to. I have arranged them to see the ratings and when I look at your catalog I do see them.

34 amanaceerdh > #1. If you look at the top of a library there are 5 letters A-E each one gives a different view of the data. click on the 'A' and your ratings should come back.

Next to the A-E is an edit button. Use this to adjust the different A-E views, you can make ratings available in all 5 or, not as you wish.

#30 skittles

> re: entering tags... two ways, either power edit & add to the group...

> or Control-C & Control-V (also known as Copy & Paste) ... that's what I use to enter & re-enter data.

First: I did not know about power edit. Could help, but not very good for the situation of initially entering the books, as I was talking about.

Second: Don't assume that I have a Windows machine. Control C and V are not the Copy and Paste functions respectively.

Third, copy and paste does not help much on the Edit page either, especially when you are trying to make the tags relevant to the work.

The idea is quick select from those you have already used without retyping them all the time, and only typing in new ones.

Think in terms of entering hundreds of works over a short period from all across the spectrum of human knowledge.

#38 Gemphyre..

Sorry about the confusion... you are right... I shouldn't have assumed a PC/Windows machine.

Power Edit: I tend to enter my books in subject groups.... all of my mysteries, romances, SciFi, fantasy, theology, organizing, cartoon books in at the same time, so I tend to put tags on in groups. I'm also very fussy about my books & am willing to give a lot of time to getting my books the way I want them. You may not have that kind of time or be willing to be as fussy as I am (I'm REALLY FUSSY!) I'm always trying to find an easier way to do this, too... but I want it nice now & am willing to work with the system as it is now. If/When it changes, I will cope with those changes.

I'm sorry that I offended you. Enjoy LT.

"Don't assume that I have a Windows machine."

Gee ... if Windows has 95% installed-base presence (with everything else scrambling for the other 5%), how could anybody be so silly to assume that?

#39 Skittles

You did not offend me. It is just hard to put emotion into plain words and stick with the facts.

I am currently doing mass entries because of limited time, trying to get as many books entered as I can before I leave for my next job (which could be as soon as 2 weeks). I am fussy, but I am also a realist. It does not take much for books to start mixing in the library list, and if you don't know about a feature like power edit at the beginning, it becomes a pain to back fill later on.

I do cope with how the system is now, but that does not prevent me from making suggestions to make it better. Especially when they have a chat area especially for that.

#40 BTRIPP

> > "Don't assume that I have a Windows machine."

> > Gee ... if Windows has 95% installed-base presence (with everything else scrambling for the other 5%), how could anybody be so silly to assume that?

Because Mac has an install base of about 10%, and Linux and other OS make up about 1%. (Windows has only about a 90% market share, hopefully less)

Not everyone is willing to work with the limitations of Windows. Some of us have higher standards. What's more, I am a software engineer by profession, and I often work with Linux machines in the course of software development, so Macs are closer to the systems I am used to, and they do not have the gaping security holes of Windows, and thus are less susceptible to viruses.

Just because more people own Windows machines is no reason to assume that the person you are writing to does.

" so Macs are closer to the systems I am used to, and they do not have the gaping security holes of Windows, and thus are less susceptible to viruses."

They are only less susceptible because fewer people use them so fewer people try to find the security holes. If %89 of computer users use Windows there is a much larger target to hit as aposed to %10 or %1. ALL the operating systems have big security holes, non-windows machines have security by obscurity.

Totally personal and apart from #1 i'm not sure anyone will even like mine... but hey, that's ok

1. I would love a "last 25 reviews" on the books zeitgeist page

2. An easier way to add an additional ISBN. As I am entering and scanning my books I quite regularly have a book which is in the database but not under the ISBN I have. It might be my lack of clue, but I haven't seen an "add new version of this book" option. Seems I have to add the book totally separately (lots of typing info which is the same) then link it to the existing book. Honestly I just don't bother, but i would if there was a way to get a prepopulated "cloned" entry and could just change date/isbn or whatever needs changing
Maybe there is a way?

3. a way to just put a year in date acquired, date started, date read. If i put just a year the system will use today's date, but as I am entering hundred of books and want to differenciate between the ones i remember reading and the ones I don't, i am putting a lot of approximate dates and it bothers me that i end up with this artificial pile of books read on march 5, 1985 and march 5, 2000 etc. I know it'd be a nightmare from a developer point of view to allow partial dates and therefore not possible, but it'd still be nicer. Could probably if when it displays dates in the library views, any dates older than, say, 2000 would just display as a year. It'd feel less fake to me.

#44 your point 2

If I understand you correctly (are some of your le Carre books an example?) - you want the pencil icon.

In your catalog view on the right hand side are a number of icons - social information, book information, edit and delete.

If you click on the pencil (edit) you can change any detail that has "incorrectly" been atributed to your book. You may change anything you wish - this data is personal only to you and effects no-one elses data.

Once this is to your liking you may have to combine your "edition" with everybody elses to produce one unified work. Please take care with this as this data effects everbody.

From the book informtation page you will see potential combinations with works sharing that ISBN. or you can go to the author page and combine from there.

1. The LibraryThing BETA image in the upper left corner has a stray white pixel in the upper right corner of the image. I'm probably the only one who has even noticed it, but I think it makes the banner look slightly less "professional".

2. I would find it extremely useful if the works that I have in my library were somehow marked on the author pages. Maybe some checkmark in the front of the title, so that when viewing the author pages you could easily see which works you have - and which are still missing from your collection.

3. The touchstones could use some minor fixing. More and more frequently, when I modify the touchstone by choosing "other" and then picking an author from the list it ends up linking to something called "fulltext" instead of the proper author.

#45

not quite - say i entered my book from memory and chose the wrong one in the list, now i have the right isbn and i would like to "switch" in a way to the entry about that isbn (which is already in the system), not create yet another duplicate entry - in a way i want the "switch cover" to switch the book registered as being in my library rather than just the picture.

Although the combine back is something I need to do, the data for quite a few of the books i scanned in came with missing dates, authors, typos in the book title etc. I cleaned them up but in a way if i want my clean up to be useful to the next person putting that isbn in i need to combine?

"if i want my clean up to be useful to the next person putting that isbn in i need to combine?"

YES.

"say i entered my book from memory and chose the wrong one in the list, now i have the right isbn and i would like to "switch" in a way to the entry about that isbn (which is already in the system), not create yet another duplicate entry - in a way i want the "switch cover" to switch the book registered as being in my library rather than just the picture.
"

If you have two or more duplicate works in your catalog - Smiley's people and smileys people for instance you can delete one of them with the red cross icon, and edit the other so that it is correct.
If you are selecting covers from Amazon be aware that the ISBN changes depending on the cover picture because amazon is "authoratitive".

Nice idea for a thread.

1) remember that I have selected "Skip confirmation (for barcodes and ISBNs)" on "add books" so I don't have to select it at the start of each cataloguing session

2) do something to the tabs at the top of the screen so that the left-aligned tabs aren't overlapped by the right-aligned tabs in 800 x 600 resolution (my computer is a little retro!)

3) make the zeitgeist page smaller or quicker to load somehow as it freezes up and crashes my browser more often than not (again, yes my computer is old)

3.5) add an "and a half" option to the "my library" ratings view... it's very quick and easy to rate multiple books in the "your library" view by mousing over the grey stars and clicking in the right place, but this restricts you to full stars only, perhaps a half-star on the next line underneath would be a quick way to say "and a half" without making the mouseover too fiddly

{edited to add (3.5)}

3.5 > if you download firefox it will allow you to do the halfs with a second click.

#50

I'm already using firefox :) cheers. *Experiments*. So I click once for full stars, and click the last star a second time to take away a half.

The things you never knew you never knew!

(In firefox) a third click will remove the rating entirely.

Having the option to "ignore" a thread/topic while I have the thread open. Right now I can "star" a thread both from the Talk list and from within the thread itself ... but I can only "ignore" from the Talk list.

it works that way in opera too

I've just started uploading my library and so far have 1 minor issue - the others are going to require some work.

When adding books, the mass market material is usually in some version of Amazon by ISBN but often without the cover if it isn't fairly new/popular. I would like an Advanced option to display User Covers to select when it is showing me titles to confirm if Amazon didn't have one.

The big reason for that is it is 5 clicks to do it through the Edit book facility. This would also address some people's concerns about going from Add -> Edit -> Catalog screens rather than back to Edit.

I'd like to be notified if I appear to be adding a book I've already added, especially if it's an identical ISBN. I would have thought that this would be an error in the majority of cases, and I'd prefer not to have to search for a book in my list before adding it.

(If I've missed an obvious configuration setting somewhere that gives me this functionality, my apologies.)

If you do add a book with a duplicate ISBN to one you already have a warning in bold is put under the book in the recently added books list on the right-hand side.

also in power edit under Misc. Powers there is a 'Find all Duplicates' which will list them for you.

Sizes of Members' library in Zeitgeist: while the biggest libraries are listed, I'm curious to see what the whole membership looks like. It would be interesting to see where my collection falls - is it really small? Average? Some sort of bar graph could be the answer. To the depiction of the data, I mean, not my questions ;^)

Agree with 59: right now the largest library list covers less than 0.3% of the users. Even just expanding it to the top 1,000 libraries would be nice but something that showed for everyone's library would be better.

Both the message in the recently added book list and the "Find All Duplicates" function are good to know about -- thank you.

However, I would still like it if I could catch the (probably) bogus data *before* I add it, rather than having to purge those records afterwards. But I recognize that other people may not care. :)

Now that I’ve entered my large virtual library of read books (4445), I want to use the software to generate recommendations. So I would like to be able to discard recommendations such as:

33. The Union Forever (Lost Regiment) by William R. Forstchen
37 copies. Average rating 3.67. Why?

because I once tried to read a book in the series and didn’t like it, and I therefore want to be recommended something else.

Yes, beeing able to mark certain books as "ignore for recommendations" would be practical.

1. Taking account of the reader's ratings in Suggestions. i want the Suggesters to give the strongest weight to the books i rank the highest. That way, popular books that i don't think are very good, and that i gave a low rank too, don't dominate my Suggestions. Or, as another person said, you could let us mark books in our catalog as 'ignore for suggestions'.

2. Allow us to search our books by two or more tag combinations -- i.e., 'christianity' and 'young adult'.

3. Let us mark other users for watching and then let us see when they have added new books or added new reviews.

4. (ok, there's 4, not 3) When we view our list of groups, highlight the groups for us that contain unread messages.

> 64 : NativeRoses : 2. is already possible check out the Tag seach FAQ. So is 4, use Your Groups and sort by 'unread/messages'. In haste, Bob

On the helpers log for work combination, an undo button would be useful, which would split the work back to the way it was.

Hawkmistress, Stormqueen and a omnibus of the two Ages of Chaos by Marion Zimmer Bradley have been combined. this is 48 editions almost evenly distributed between the three works so it's about 30 separations plus recombination to put it right!

Although this improvement may be small as I see it implementing it may be very different.

second small improvement - only allow combinations by members with messaging enabled on their profile page.

#67: Do you mean IM'ing/messaging because I do believe that you can always leave a private comment on their profile page.

I prefer to leave my IM name off of this board... off any board, especially since I don't use it anymore except to get email notifications.

> I do believe that you can always leave a private comment

No. Default is 'allow comments', but you can put it to 'disallow comments'.

Ok, some people choose to not allow private or public comments... I was wrong.

If I did something "wrong" I hope that someone would gently tell me that.

I would also like the "undo" button for stuff I have done... on LT & in RL!!!

> on LT & in RL!!!

:-)

1. Disallow the combining/separating of works by non-members.

2. see #1

3. Change the 'work' link on the combiners log. The link would be more helpful if it pointed to the book information page rather than the social information page.

> 72

RE: #3

Oh, yes, please! And the ability to "uncombine" multiple books at the same time.

#25: I'd like to see the LT authors arranged by genres/categories, so I'd have an idea whether I might be interested in checking out the work of an unfamiliar author.

#68: I'm pretty sure I did see a notification on the add books page the couple of times I entered a book I'd previously entered.

Can I see a book's overall rating (not mine) from the social info page listed with my books? Just trying to prioritize my TBR list, also curious about divergent opinions when scanning my tagged books. Thanks!

Bob -- thank you!

1. Disallow database editing by non-members ;

2. Add a "Personal call number" field in the user data ;

3. Telepathic interface.

Here's my list of small improvements. First up, I'd like to say that I've seen a constant stream of improvement and changes over the past 16mths from when I first joined. Yay LT!

Niggles of the moment - apologies for 3-cubed.

Author Pictures
1) Set up a auto-message notifying people who've added author pictures which breach copyright etc that they've been flagged and are in quarantine (plus comments on whoever flagged them as the exact reason is usually given).
2) Disallow anyone from adding author pictures unless they have LT messaging enabled (so that #1 can happen)
3) If can't do 1 or 2 - Work out a way for people who have free libraries to see the quarantine area - even if they can't unflag.
4) Update the help/description information at "add picture" so people merrily adding loads of pictures can understand why they vanish. Maybe an example of a "good" vs "bad" picture comment (eg - "copyright xxxx Permission from author emailed to LT" vs. "found on google images")

5) Combining - ditto for non members NOT being able to combine works. I will say that incidents have dropped off though.

6) Add a bit more combining advice for newbie's - maybe a combiners FAQ link?

7) Talk - Find out how the new members manage to send plaintive messages asking for help that don't link to any groups & so you cannot reply to their message. Fix it. I feel sorry for them!

8) Can any new member automatically be given membership to the FAQ group?

9) Groups - make the groups a bit easier to search and navigate. There's been a couple of discussions already so I won't repeat - but we've got almost 2,000 groups - there's got to be an easier way to search amongst them.

Whew! That feels better - still absolutely loving LT though :-)

> 7) Talk - Find out how the new members manage to send plaintive messages asking for help that don't link to any groups

Is this still happening? There are several threads about this - the latest in bug reports seems to be this one.

Maybe link to new examples there?

> A way to get to your ignored posts easily.

This has been added: behind the link "(more)" below "Your starred".

Thanks :-)

My three small improvement wishes for today:

1) a way to find threads that never got a reply

2) make 'give yours' on the swap page work again (specific ISBN instead of work)

3) properly introduce Altay

#80, point 3 Yes! We've seen him around; let's get to know who he is so we can welcome him!

>79 sunny: - Done! See http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=10185

I looked but can't find the post from the other day where a new user asked for someone to explain how Talk and Groups worked - who obviously won't get a reply to their message in Talk.

I've tried to respond to a few by leaving a comment on their profile page explaining that talk is tricky and they need to join a group before sending any posts - but it shouldn't be that un-intuitive first time members.

> they need to join a group before sending any posts

No - I just posted a new topic as a user who isn't in any group - the thread got attached to the group as it should have.

#82, 83 I don't think you have to be a member to post in a group unless it's a group that specifies that membership is required for posting. I post to groups that I "watch" (as opposed to join).

Thank you; that's when it works as it should, yes.

But the question is: why are there posts that don't get attached to any group - and what can be done to prevent them.

I tried to deliberately post in no groups ----- on post a new topic, it still went into book talk.

Who can imagine the shear ingeniousness of the average user.

if someone goes to the talk tab having not joined any groups and posts it will NOT be part of any group.

It seems to have been when a new user went to post in talk _directly_ after joining - just not beeing member of any group didn't trigger the bug.

Tim fixed it :-)

Does that mean I get a new wish? ;-)

1) a permalink for each talk post (to make it easier to link to them)

Add 2007 as edition publication date at the personal statistic page.

I have a couple, after just a day or two's use:

- See message #82: there's a bug in the parsing of hrefs that sometimes causes the text after the link to get "eaten"; hover over the link and you'll see how in addition to the href there's some HTML (BRs) and some user-entered text. I had this happen to my own first-post in the welcome note in a new group I created yesterday.

- "You and none other" under "Fun statistics": shouldn't that be "You and one other"? Or am I missing the joke?

- I'd like to see more stats on "only a few people have this book". You can get some of it by clicking on the entry in your library. Similarly, it would be interesting to see how my "unique" book may have been the seed for someone else's acquisition of it. A metric of influence, if you will.

Keep up the good work!

Think of "You and none other" as if you were talking to that person and "You" referred to that person. It's some sort of obscure literary reference that someone else can explain.

92:it is an attempted translation of a French term I believe.

One small thing would be when you are selecting the languague of a book, if you put in a small language at the primary listing (where you have to first press "show all languages") you then have the large list for secondary & original language. This means a lot of scrolling, although you can put in the first letter of the language. So, if the primary languagw is Lithuanian, and the secondary language is French, you can put in F to get to the top of the list of every language which begins with an F. It would be nice to be able to type in more of the letters and get there more quickly.

Another thing would be for (older) books without either an ISBN number of a LC card number, to be able to add into the search the information that comes up in parentheses when you do a search via Amazon, such as date or publisher. If you put in a title and author and get back 185 responses, it is actually quicker to type in the whole thing manually than laboriously scroll through the entire listing popping up from Amazon. This has been a particular problem with the International Collectors Series from the 1970's.

I believe that you can put in the publisher. Try entering title, author, publisher with commas between each item.

#94, I tested it. With Amazon, if you put in the publisher, it only shows titles in which the publisher is listed as part of what Amazon considers the title, not if the publisher is listed elsewhere in the Amazon information.

I tested "So Human an Animal," Dubos and got 19 results, some of which listed Scribners as publisher (my copy is published by Scribners). When I then tested for "So Human an Animal," Dubos, Scribners, I got only one result which included Scribners in the title, not the various other copies in which Scribners was listed only as a publisher.

However, putting in the publisher and/or date does work with LOC.

> properly introduce Altay

Done :-)

So I'll replace it with

3) Put up a _second_ color style sheet which could be chosen in 'edit profile'. This way the many people who like the colors as they are could keep them and the ones who'd prefer clearer colors (and a _not_ brownish/pinkish header) could switch to the other one.

*dreams on*

#95, I've used publisher successfully with other library sources, too. But it does depend on exactly how the source entered the book. However, using the publisher helped a lot with some much published, popular paperbacks.

A (straw) poll feature for groups, per yahoo discussion groups. (A major addition, I'm sure, but might be useful in choosing books to discuss, etc.)

Fire fox 2.0 has an spell check built in...

(#99--thanks, I'll check it out!)

(#107--thanks. >never mind

I would love it if, after tagging several books in 'PowerEdit Mode', the selected books were automatically deselected. I've mistagged books several times, having forgotten to click 'Deselect all'. A very minor issue, of course, but that seems to be what this thread's for!

But I would rather it DIDN'T deselect those selections since I often have to continue working with those books.

That's one of the challenges of LT... everyone wants it to work their way!!

The solution would be to allow users to set their own preferences for all the little things like that....

I would like to be able to choose how many reviews are visible at once in the "in jennythereader's library and reviewed by others" column of my reviews page.

I think 100 reviews on a single page is a little unwieldy. Being able to customize it would make it much more useful to me.

Check for bugs in "edit" function for messages, please.

I'm finding that pieces in the "edit" box don't make it to the revised message, e.g., a last parens, a paragraph break, first couple words of a sentence.

Separating Talk threads into pages of ~50 posts.

> message 100: typo ... says “current password” when I think owner meant “current user name”?

"Current password" is correct, as this is for verification (as Abby points out).

I have one I'd like to see: when you click on a shared book on someone's profile page (in common books link in the right-had column) it would be nice if that took you to the edition owned by the person whose profile you're looking at instead of to the general page for the work.

How about on the zeitgeist helpers page, add a category showing stats on people who added the most book covers. I think this is extremely helpful for the pre-ISBN book collectors! THanks

My three top small improvements are:
1. location
2. location
3. location.
I would dearly love to have a separate location field, so I can enter a description of where each book resides.
Right now I'm entering tags such as "loc sewing room", "loc office", "loc living room", "loc upstairs north", etc, which works just fine. However, these tags mean nothing to anyone except me, and I'd like to keep them out of the site tag statistics, and keep them out of my profile's fun statistics.
I'm a one-week newbie who loves this site!

> 111 - perhaps, since I gather that Tim&Co. really like tags, what you want is private tags. Perhaps any tag preceded by a "magic" character or sequence would only be visible to you.

But a separate field (852?) would be more practical because you could sort by it (and it would be one thing less to show up in the tag cloud although it doesn't belong there).

I haven't read every thread on site improvements, so this might actually fall under a "non-small improvements" category. But without a doubt, since the first day I started using Library Thing I've wanted a "Currently Reading" field. Whether this is simply a new profile field, or a fill-in feature if you've appropriately tagged the books you're reading doesn't really matter to me.

There is 'Dates: started' - but I don't think it _does_ anything.

It would be cool if books with a 'date - started' but no 'date - finished' could be displayed on your profile page. Or, as you said, those tagged 'currently reading'. Or, even better: if the blog widget would work on our profile pages - there you already _can_ limit the display to a certain tag.

In the meantime, you could have a look at GreyHead's post here.

#114

Thanks for the link sunny, I would still love a separate feature (the blog widget embedded in your profile is a great idea), but GreyHead's instructions for adding the pics is definitely an improvement over what I have now.

> the blog widget embedded in your profile

Got its own thread now ;-)

And a wish for a _really_ small improvement:

On the profile page, put the link to edit your profile behind "Edit your profile" instead of "to prevent commenting".

Sorry Sunny. You already got one feature today. One per day per customer.

Fine with me :-D

Ooh, what was the new feature?

(more space) links on Edit profile, so you have more space for "About me" and "About my library."

I'd really like to have access to the 'Series' field that already shows up when you export your library to a CSV or tab-delimited file. If that were on the Edit page and/or a choice for a column, I could track series and sequence for all my many many series. There, that should be minor enough, shouldn't it?

(Oh, and make it a sortable and searchable column, please. Or one or the other, if both is difficult)

And another thing I'd love to have is an extension of the PowerEdit 'add tags' - extend it to other columns, so I could add say to my Author or Dewey Decimal column. I'm cataloging there using Fic (genre) (author or subject as appropriate), and there are a lot of books where I'm entering the exact same thing or nearly the same thing for 30-40 books at a time. I can and do use cut-and-paste to fill them in, but PowerEdit would be easier.

Oh, and for my third thing - an easier way to select a bunch of books for PowerEdit would be very helpful. I keep trying to shift-click to get a whole column and it keeps not working...I know, a webpage isn't the same thing as a text file, but is there any way for LT to detect that you want 'everything from here to there' selected? Frequently I want many but not all of a page's worth of books selected, and click-and-scroll gets to be a pain around 30 books...

My three minor things would be:

1. If it's too complicated to grab the user's time zone on the Talk pages, how would it be to put the current server time at the top of the page, so that we don't have to remember how many hours to add/subtract?

2. A "Talk" link at the bottom of the topic pages (one click less to get back to the topic list)

3. On the date fields at the bottom of the book edit pages, some kind of date entry widget would be nice. Or at the least a cookie that remembers whether you're a DMYer or an MDYer.

1. A "next" button in threads, so when I get to the end of a thread I can hit "next" and go to the next unread thread without having to go back to the Talk site.

2. As someone mentioned above, a "location" part separate from the tags. I have books stored in 3 places all over the country, and I'd like to have that separate from my tags.

3. Don't really have a third right now...though if someone could fix the "alphabetize tags" function, that would be great. It works, but every once in a while I'll be going through my catalog and find the tags have resorted themselves into an un-alphabetized list.

#123, ArmyAngel1986. For your #1, if you have Firefox, you can open a bunch of threads in new tabs. As you read a thread, close the tab. When you're done, you'll be back at the Talk list. This is what I do.

> 124

Also possible in IE7 by ctrl-clicking on a link

1. On the various library pages where it shows "(1) 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 22 (show all)" instead have the first letter/s of the item at the top of the list, e.g. if it's sorted by title, it would show "(1) A B Ca Cr ... W (show all)".

2. Stable sorting -- computer programmers should know what that means. If I sort by title, then sort by author, it should remain sorted by title for each author. As it is, if you sort by title then author, each author's titles are in random order. Alternately, provide multi-level sorting definitions within the Display Styles definition. I really want my library sorted by author then title.

3. Series field -- with room for series name and number within series. I really want my library sorted by Author, then Series, then Title. (For now I get around this by putting the series at the beginning of the title field, in brackets, but it would be better in its own field. And yes, I know some people use tags.)

1) Search by Publisher (Minority Interest but valuable)

Thats it right now!
Eoin

Yunno, I had all these little annoyances about LT, just small things I'd want fixed, last week. And now they all seem to have been fixed, or dissapeared or something. lol

The only thing I can think of right now is that I would love to be able to sort my library by series. I really, really would.

I would like to be able to go to Tools, click on Cleanup, and have choices: Images needed, Tags needed, Reviews needed. With a click on Images needed, I'd see all my books without images in Library view, so I can scan whatever needs to be scanned.
By the way, I found the book piles in Tools this morning. Cooking and Valentine's Day were great laughs! Thanks!

I second webecca's Cleanup idea. Even with 100 books you might miss tagging one here and there.

I'm not sure if this suggestion is a small improvement or if it's already been mentioned. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE if we could drop and drag to order our collections. For example, if I sort by author, then I want them to be ordered a certain way (for all of one author's particular series to be grouped together) or to be arranged by author first, then by date published.... I would LOVE this feature.

#129, 130 For tags, you can go to your library, click on the tags header to sort by tags, and the books with no tags will all appear first.

Just started reading your suggestions and wonder if I've missed out on the tag problem. I have trouble viewing mine in "tag" as I have a lot. Is there some way I can divide them for better reading. For example grouping all the tags that begin with A, leave a space or two and then all the Bs and so on. Is there a solution? Thanks

Heather 19: for series, do you mean by the name of the series? I have several series in my catalog, and I put the series name and book number before the book title: Mrs. Murphy #01: Wish You Were Here or Animorphs #01: the Visitor, etc.

#134: I understand how that will do the job of sorting by series. But then I can't sort by title, which is even more important to me. Also, the purist in me doesn't want to put anything in the title field that isn't on the title page of the book.

So I'll put in one more request for a series field.

I'll second the motion for a Series field. I would want this in advance of being able to use ISSN numbers.

Bob Campbell

This probably isn't a minor change, but it is something I'd like to see: I'd like to be able to search my library by eliminating certain tags. I've been trying to tag all my books by location, but I haven't been able to find the last 6 books that do not have locations. If I could tell the catalog to search for books that do NOT have the tags "Virginia", "Sulphur", or "Storage" in them, it would be so much easier. And also a useful tool to have for future taggings.

> 137

Actually, you can do this now. Try entering the following at the Your Library field on the Search page:

* -tag:Virginia -tag:Sulphur -tag:Storage

This should work (make sure that you include the asterisk), since your tags are relatively short. Unfortunately, there is a somewhat modest limit on the search string size, so this will not work if you are trying to exclude several longer tags.

Silent: you're incredible. :D

Is there any way to search other people's libraries like that?

i do search like -@* to find out which books I have not located yet (i tag @box1 @living room to know where my books are)

For those requesting series sorting use tags see, here . you can add an author tag in first. See my catalog, then sort by tags.

Here's an improvement I'd like to see: When you're looking at the main Talk page, the group name in each topic should link to the group, rather than being part of the link to the topic. Would make it easier to join or ignore the group without extraneous clicks.

What i would like to have is a private "location" field, or the option to make some tags private.

I have used tag to track where the book is, but all those "@box f2" tags are really polluting my tag cloud

I haven't been active here for many months, just renewed and now am looking for how to link up my REVIEWS? Anybody know where this little gadget is located?

145>Could you be more specific?

Do you mean the chain icon at the bottom of the review that brings you to a 'permanent link'?

Three small improvements:

1. A simple (non-ISBN) text import. No lookup, just the same as manually entering all those books. Just some sort of tab-delimited (or whatever--Euro character, whatever) file. "The fields must be in this order or it won't work." "This field must have data in this format or it won't work." I can follow rules.

2. I agree with the first poster. The LC column should sort properly.

And in the spirit of some other posts, my 3rd suggestion is "a simple (non-ISBN) text import.

What I'd like to see is extremely simple: enlarge the size of the Date field by just one character.

The reason is that, following traditional library cataloging practice, I'd like to enter both a book's copyright date and its publication date, if they differ. Example: "2002, c1998", meaning it was copyrighted in 1998 but this particular printing was in 2002.

But I can't do that because the date field is just one character too short. The above example gets truncated to "2002, c199".

Actually, the Date field probably should be enlarged by two or three characters rather than just one, to allow for cases of two copyright dates ("c1998, c2002") or other date anomalies.

1. First and foremost, BATCH TAGGING! I want to be able to tag a bunch of books without having to open a new tab, add book, edit, type in tag. It's really time consuming.

150: can't you do that with the power-edit thing? (it's a question, 'cause that's what I thought that feature was for... i've never used it)

Heather

#151 yep that's what it does.
#150 the little p/e icon. You can 100 books at a time.
Note p/e tends to add tags to the back of the tag list, so think carefully if you are going to be sorting on tags because sort starts at the first tag.