Priority vote: Book discussions or lists?

Recently we've had substantial conversations about:

1. Lists. Collective list-making of various sorts.

2. Book-based discussions and "super-touchstones." See http://www.librarything.com/topic/101776 , especially later posts. The idea is summed up in http://www.librarything.com/topic/101776#2292445

Both are wanted. Both could help the site.

So, all things being equal—assume, for example, they are equally hard to do—which should be the next feature priority?

There's no way to make an A or B vote, so I'll express this as Yes/No.Feel free to add comments. Note, this is a straw poll. I'm not saying I'll go with the result.

So torn. On the one hand, I think book discussions are better for the site in general. On the other hand, I think Lists are good for certain problems that users cause and can't be dissuaded from (publisher series, for example).

Ultimately, I chose Lists.

ETA: Changed to Undecided due to the discussion below.

>2 brightcopy:

You are assuming lists will be--or will allow--edition- or book-level additions. I'm open to arguments (made elsewhere), but my inclination would be to have them be a work-level feature.

I'd rather handle publisher series in another way, like a level between "editions" and works, and CK attached to that.

I don't really know...it depends on how lists will be implemented. A discussion section attached to individual lists would boost their priority for me, but simple lists without a conversation feature would probably give book discussions/super-touchstones priority, depending on the other features intended for lists.

3> I suppose I'm also assuming Lists will also allow personal (rather the community only) lists. I other words, I could create a list that had all kinds of works on it that didn't ever get forced on anyone else's view of those works (like how if I add a book to a Series, that's now forced on everyone else's copy). Am I wrong on that?

If so, I'm not sure of even the straw poll value here, if people are thinking of some completely different Lists feature than #1 actually means.

I voted for book-based discussions/super-touchstones solely because it's a lot clearer what should be done there. A conversation has just taken place and it seems like we've more or less reached a consensus. You've proposed a specific implementation that seems like it will work. So strike while the iron is hot and implement that now.

I'm more excited about lists in general, but we haven't seen any proposals and I'm not at all convinced that lists would actually end up doing what I wanted if they were implemented now.

As _Zoe_ and brightcopy both indicated, we don't know what you have in mind for Lists, which makes it rather difficult to make an informed decision.

Based on my own interpretations of both features, I think Discussions would be more valuable to LT overall, but I would probably make more immediate use of Lists.

I voted 'Undecided' as meaning 'Neither'

I don't wish to seem obstructionist by voting against both proposals and offering nothing in their place.

On the other hand, I definitely do not want to de-rail this thread, so I will just leave it as 'Neither' and quietly expound my wishes elsewhere.

Thank you for your time, please carry on. ;)

I voted 'Undecided' as meaning 'Neither'

Ditto. Honestly, I don't care about either of those features. There are other things I'm more interested in.

Interesting. It was running very strongly against, then suddenly went up. Hmmm.

Lists could be so many different things and I'm sure that you don't mean to implement the ultimate set of features of lists (public vs. private, closed vs. anyone can add books to it, the ability to track your progress against a list, other things I can't remember). Given what you've done in the past I'm assuming that you would implement the simplest version of lists now and move onto something else. So given the simplest version of lists that I can imagine vs. what was discussed for work-based discussions I voted for the latter.

I'm excited about the possibility of both, but I agree with Zoe in that we've been having this very productive (I feel!) conversation about a feature that it looks like there is pretty strong agreement on the shape of, so I'd rather see that go forward while people consider what they want out of lists and we have a similar discussion on that.

I know lists have been talked about in the past, but it seems like there is a lot more variety in what people want or would find acceptable - so maybe not harder on the coding side, but on general making people happy with the outcome side?

Anyway. I am excited about both!

>7 SylviaC:&8 Ditto.
Other things are of more interest to me.

For reference, here are a couple of threads discussing lists:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/99283
http://www.librarything.com/topic/75014

10>

Well, I changed my vote when Tim clarified upthread, since it no longer looks like Lists would help eliminate publisher series (which would be my main reason for supporting them.)

>3 timspalding:
You are assuming lists will be--or will allow--edition- or book-level additions.

How so? The problem with publisher's series is that they display in users' catalogs and at the top of the work page in a way that says, "This book is in the series," even when your book may not be in the series. But a publisher's series list would only say, "these works have been published in this series."

It would be a special bonus to get the correct covers and links to the correct publication data, but I (and likely others) would be satisfied with the basic work list.

I voted for Lists because I'm pretty sure I'll use them (and for the record, I'm hoping/assuming they'll be something relatively developed along the lines of things post 11 mentions, not just bare-bones; it would be nice to know what this might be, however). I probably wouldn't use book discussions or super-touchstones. I'm a bit skeptical about the idea of super-touchstones, because I suspect that they'll simply turn into what touchstones are now, and, whatever the original intentions, they'll get used for any mention of the book.

I agree with #16 in every way.

I wouldn't mind seeing a public domain book added to a zillion different publisher's series lists.

I like both ideas, but lists seem like they would solve most of the issues that crop up in the 'Librarything Series' group and would I think have more of an effect on users.

Well, my gut reaction is to vote for Lists because of my all-around dislike of usual book-discussion proposal (comments on reviews). However, since it looks like people are now finding other, better ideas for that, and since I would never use lists anyways, I'll vote for book-discussion.

It would be a special bonus to get the correct covers and links to the correct publication data, but I (and likely others) would be satisfied with the basic work list.

So you're saying that lists could be work-level and still handle publisher's series--basically by not appearing in members' catalogs?

>20 timspalding:

More or less. I never imagined that lists would appear in members' catalogs. Wouldn't it be too much of a mess?

As to whether lists can "handle" publisher's series, well it depends on how fancy you want to get.

If you want to see the list of works in the publisher's series it's great. If you want to see the works you own in the publisher's series, well, it kind of works. But you might have some copies in the series and some copies by other publishers and there would be no way to tell the difference. And if you were doing something very edition specific, like tracking your progress replacing your old paperbacks with Franklin Library leather-bound editions, it wouldn't work at all.

Then there's the long-term question. At some point in the future you develop a workable editions layer and want to use it for publisher's edition series. Does already having work lists of those series around make that harder or easier?

Last point. Let's say you put out a list feature and tell people not to use it this way. I don't look forward to policing publisher's series lists on top of regular publisher's series.

Bear with me, I'm very tired so may not express this clearly. If the list info does not appear in people's catalogs, there will need to be some way that the lists can be accessed, or they'll just disappear into the ether. Is a page like the personal series page envisioned? "These are all your titles that are on lists made by you or by other people"?

RE:"Super-touchstones" =

Before we "super" them, could we please get the ones we have now to work correctly?

I have just tried to touchstone a book titled "The Middle Ages", by Dorothy Mills. I can't. Why? Because it doesn't come up in the list of possibilities, not even when I expand it to "show all 100". And yet books that do not even have the words "the middle ages" in the title are offered!

#22 - I wouldn't mind lists showing as a column in my catalog (then again, I'm also pretty free and easy about series).

If that is a problem with most users, perhaps lists could show on your profile/home page, but not in your library. Then you could choose to display just lists you created or any lists containing books you own?

23> Well, the last reproducible touchstone bug I reported got "Deferring for Talk redo" by Tim.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/101234

I submitted a bug report for your example:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/102000

But I imagine it will probably get the same deferment.

I don't care about whether lists can show in the catalogue or not, but there definitely has to be a separate list page as well, that shows all the lists I've created, all the lists I've contributed to, and all the lists that my books belong to (probably with the latter as a separate page).

What Zoe said.

Lists requires a new personal page. It probably ought to have a new top-level page where we can see recent lists and active lists as well. The work page should also have a new section (lists on which this work appears).

For me I see lists as sitting somewhere between talk and catalogue. It definitely has social use-cases as well as some use-cases which aren't.

Like Tim I don't see Lists as being terribly useful for publisher series however I'm not sure a minimal implementation of lists is enough.

I voted for Lists because on personal preference, I'd like them more but actually either feature would be a plus if they're implemented & work effectively.

I'm with lilithcat though. Before Touchstones get 'super' just getting them fully working would help. Most weeks I touchstone something that either doesn't work in some way or doesn't find the work I'm after. There's no point in having super touchstones if it's still unreliable.

I voted for Lists in the hopes that they would get publisher series out of Series; if they aren't actually going to do that, I'll change my vote.

>7 SylviaC:&8 Ditto.
Other things are of more interest to me. (#13)

Agreed. I'd like to see lists and the discussions/supertouchstones would be okay... but not until other things are done. Like finishing half-done features like Other Authors, which has been languishing for a good long while now with no indication that it will be either finished or abandoned entirely.

>2 brightcopy:, 3, 30, etc.
I think I'm missing something. Even if the lists are work level only, wouldn't they still be able to get publisher series out of the series field? I can't think of what users are getting out of manipulating series to get publisher series that they wouldn't get out of the simplest list. All they get now is the winning cover (no guarantee it's from the publisher's version), colored checkmarks, and some rudimentary sorting option. (I am assuming one could include items not in one's catalog on lists).

Voted "undecided" as I saw the other thread about "Contains/Contained" vs. "Other Authors" first. I vote for those first, hands down.

I voted for book-based discussions and super-touchstones ahead of lists, primiarily because I don't know for sure I could make any use of lists... I know for a fact that, if lists are going to be anything like editing wikki pages, creating or editing them would be beyond my skill set... and with few known details about what lists would be like, I can't honestly say I'd prefer them, but I do see their potential usefulness for the site in general.

That said, I'd prefer that unfinished things such as other authors and balky touchstones take priority over anything new that can't be quickly finished and presented. For instance, if completing "other authors" and similarly unfinished features would take several weeks or months but finishing and presenting lists and/or supertouchstones with the book based discussions would take much less time, then I can see perhaps introducing the new if the other isn't delayed too long.

Oh, and I was just reminded of the contains/contained feature too. That should definitely be finished first.

32> Yeah, I have to admit I'm lost on that one, too. I think maybe Tim is talking about some IDEAL publisher series that takes specific edition into account (which makes sense for a publisher series). But that isn't what exists now. Many of us want Lists not to make publisher-series-creators happy, but to make grumpy-series-cleaners happy. Or at least less grumpy.

I voted neither (undecided), because contains/contained in and other authors ( http://www.librarything.com/topic/101990 ) need doing before either of these.

36>

Well, if the only way to say that those are higher priority is to vote undecided, which is tremendously counterintuitive (if I'm asked to choose between A and B, and I would prefer A, but I'd like C even better, I should vote "undecided"?) then I'll change to that.

Yet Tim didn't ask about C, he asked that among the choices A or B which do you prefer. If you really don't care between A or B then undecided is the right answer, but if you do care then by voting undecided you're throwing away your vote on A vs. B.

by voting undecided you're throwing away your vote on A vs. B
Exactly.

Edit to add: and I want it to be known and counted that I'm throwing away that vote.

>38 jjwilson61:

Bingo. In this case I absolutely don't care about A or B.

I think it's really counterproductive to tell Tim not to work on the features that he's planning to work on. Ask him to make relationships or other authors his next priority. Rejecting everything that he tries to do because it's not your highest priority will just result in nothing being accomplished.

Nobody's telling him not to work on anything, nobody can do that. Even if nobody voted undecided, and everybody voted for the same option, he still reserved the right to do whatever he pleased. From message 1: I'm not saying I'll go with the result..

He did ask us what we wanted, though, and we're telling him.

38> you're throwing away your vote on A vs. B

You mean my completely non-binding straw poll vote on features that come way down on my personal priority list?

Heavens, no.

;)

41> Others would say it's counterproductive to keep asking for a feature Tim has already said would turn LT into an orgy party. You work your way, I'll work mine! :D

38,39>

I KNOW THAT. Which is why initially I voted in exactly the common-sense method you describe. Noisy's telling me that's not actually what Tim meant, though.

What special insight does Noisy have to Tim's mind that the rest of us don't have?

>43 brightcopy: Meh. It's getting tedious to see Tim scrapping one proposal after another in the face of even the most limited protest. He's apparently pretty bad at judging what people are objecting to, and I'd just like to see progress being made on something.

The other poll, with its particular interpretation of "undecided", was not started by Tim.

In the good old days Tim would just implement whatever he damned well pleased and if there was any objection in Talk he'd explain that we were not a representative sample of LT users.

I like his more recent willingness to listen to other points of view but I'm afraid he may have gone too far in the other direction.

(The above contains more than a little bit of exaggeration for the fun of it).

46> I'd prefer him scrap some things, if he's just going to half-implement them and leave other half-implemented stuff unfinished.

But I think you're really talking about the names on thumbs, which was scrapped because a significant minority of the people on that Talk topic was against it. I think he made the right call on that one, even if the majority would have been happy with the feature. I don't really think he's that bad at judging what people are objecting to.

Or are there more "one proposal after another" examples that you're referring to? It really seems like maybe you're just exaggerating a little. But I could be wrong!

>48 brightcopy: I think he made completely the wrong call on names on thumbs, since most people were objecting to aspects of his explanation for the change rather than to the change itself.

The big one that stands out in the past is the Currently Reading checkboxes, which were implemented about two years before Collections and were scrapped immediately because some people didn't like the connection to the date fields. The correct solution would have been to make that connection optional, not to take away the feature for a couple of years.

More recently, Tim even thought that people were unhappy with the bug tracking feature, when there were just a few people (or even one?) making a fuss about one particular aspect of it. That really shows how badly he interprets the slightest bit of negativity.

Likewise, he thought people didn't like the new Tags page when the debate was really about the removal of the Tags tab.

And he thought people didn't like the new homepage when the objections were to the removal of the Profile tab.

Basically, the slightest bit of criticism, even if it's about a minor aspect of the feature, can derail the whole thing. But I suspect that Tim works better when he thinks that the users are happy with what he's doing. And it's just inefficient to start thinking seriously about a new feature and then postpone it to the point where the whole discussion will have to happen again in the future. There are going to be both Lists and improved book discussion capabilities at some point, along with Other Authors and Relationships. I'd rather he implement the one he's thinking about now, even if it's not my personal priority.

Also, the whole Relationships delay is a completely different issue, not even related to a balancing of priorities. I'm surprised more people haven't weighed in in that thread.

That really shows how badly he interprets the slightest bit of negativity.

No, sometimes it just means I'm grumpy.

Also, the whole Relationships delay is a completely different issue, not even related to a balancing of priorities.

Right. Although it's a huge undertaking of it's own.

I like his more recent willingness to listen to other points of view but I'm afraid he may have gone too far in the other direction.

I think you overestimate what this poll was for. It wasn't supposed to be definitive. The result would have had to be very unbalanced for me to question doing either. As it is, I feel quite free to do either.

>50 timspalding: Well, I still think it's best to avoid making you grumpier when you're on the verge of doing some productive development work. (Great bug-fixing progress on Saturday, by the way! ;))

I think you overestimate what this poll was for. It wasn't supposed to be definitive.

I read jjwilson's comment as being more about the thumb names than about this poll. If you had just implemented it, along with the promised opt-out, any objections would have died down by now.

As it is, I feel quite free to do either.

If you do decide to go with Lists, I hope you'll start a discussion thread outlining what the feature would do; I think the recent discussion was extremely helpful for refining the book-discussion proposal.

Whether it's a public discussion or not, lists needs to be fleshed out, I agree.

I'm less likely to be quite as open with lists, though. I don't think users are very good planning totally new features. Seeing lists primarily as a way to solve the problem of publisher lists strikes me as the perfect example of that. (No offense intended, but that's how I see it.) With luck, Chris Holland will be working again soon, and he's the perfect sounding board.

>52 timspalding: Blech. Go kill a kitten now. Have you read the two list threads I linked to above?

52> Publisher series are the biggest impetus behind lists because they are such a problem in Series. I get the impression that its a constant battle to keep series free of publishers series.

51> Actually I couldn't care less about named thumbs on recommendations. I'm pleased as punch to think that Tim might soon be implementing something that I might use.

To elaborate on my earlier comments: I'm hugely discouraged about this whole process now. It's far too reminiscent of the whole Collections development situation, where one of the main motivators from a user perspective was to separate Wishlists from our other books, but Tim dismissed that as a ridiculous concept and deliberately excluded the possibility. Then people had to beg for months and months to get purple checkmarks at the very least, and even now there's a desire for more Wishlist separation.

We don't need another elaborate feature that misses the core of what people want to do. I don't personally think Publisher Series are a priority, but they're something that should fit easily within a broader List structure. Why not develop the feature so that it does what people want and more, instead of saying that your users are misguided?

I agree completely with Zoe and really can't say anything more without ranting/babbling.

>52 timspalding:
Seeing lists primarily as a way to solve the problem of publisher lists...

Since I was talking about publishers' series above I just wanted to be clear that this is not my view. I'm only mildly interested in entering publishers' series as lists. But the inability to enter publishers' series is out there as a vacuum and if lists are available people will want to use them to fill that hole.

My grand hope for lists would be the ability to make collaborative annotated lists of key works in various subject areas. I have no idea if that will be an option or if anyone would join me in the project even if it were.

I suspect lists would be used for an endless variety of purposes so the more flexible the structure the better. This expected variety is also why I thought a catalog column would get unwieldy very fast. But we certainly need to be able to see what lists we have books in and which of our books are in a particular list.

57: "My grand hope for lists would be the ability to make collaborative annotated lists of key works in various subject areas. I have no idea if that will be an option or if anyone would join me in the project even if it were."

Yes. This.

52>

I don't see lists primarily as a way to solve the problem of publisher series; I see them as the most obvious way to solve that problem. Sure, there are other uses for Lists that will be more interesting, but if publisher series aren't one of them, that's going to remain an unfilled need, and people are going to keep abusing Series for it.

We don't need another elaborate feature that misses the core of what people want to do. I don't personally think Publisher Series are a priority, but they're something that should fit easily within a broader List structure. Why not develop the feature so that it does what people want and more, instead of saying that your users are misguided?

Actually, they don't fit easily into a broader list structure. They are something that could be made to fit with considerable pushing. Publisher series are hard because their constituent elements don't fit into any of the categorical boxes LibraryThing has and upon which lists must somehow anchor themselves.

What are publisher series anyway? They are lists of editions (eg., every edition in the Modern Library) or clusters of editions of the same book (every edition in the Modern Library, but rolling up so that a hardback and paperback of the same basic item isn't counted twice) from the same publisher. What exactly is that in LibraryThing terms? Nothing. We don't have a true "editions" layer. Putting them on the books level would be madness. Putting them on the works level will get them out of other series--to some extent. But people will still complain that such-and-such a work isn't really part of a series. It's only part of it in the French edition of 1880, or whatever. The name of the work within the series, the cover shown, the author listed, etc. would all present problems.

That people hate publisher series in series is clear. That people have latched onto lists as way of accomplishing this is predicable and misguided. We could, for instance, make a new "Publisher Series" CK entry on the work level that would accomplish the same separation proposed above. That might be a good idea. But it would be a half solution, and it would in no way obviate the usefulness of lists.

and even now there's a desire for more Wishlist separation.

No, this is your hobby-horse. You can, by asserting a counterfactual, get people to vote for something. ("LibraryThing should stop sending my personal information to the Chinese government.") In fact, wishlists are separate. What's missing is your desire that there by absolutely no way of seeing them together. I don't design UIs to make things impossible.

My grand hope for lists would be the ability to make collaborative annotated lists of key works in various subject areas.

No, let's use them to make ambiguous lists of works for which parts of it may be considered to be part of a series within a limited number of publishers.

Since it's exactly the same separation proposed, I'm going to make a new CK field for publisher series. It's not a full solution, but it's a partial one, and it will at least get the publisher series out from underneath discussion of lists.

>60 timspalding: People already responded to your point about editions. They don't matter nearly as much as you think.

You can, by asserting a counterfactual, get people to vote for something.

Stop pretending your users are idiots just because they disagree with you. Do you really think it would just take a sneakily-worded poll to get almost twice as many in favour of Review Comments as opposed?

Here's a recent, non-poll-based discussion of wishlist separation. The conclusion seems to be that Lists might be a solution. Of course, I'm sure that's an "unauthorized" usage that you'll heap with scorn if you can't prevent it outright. I await an announcement that Lists can only be used for books in our catalogues.

No, let's use them to make ambiguous lists of works for which parts of it may be considered to be part of a series within a limited number of publishers.

It would be nice if you respected users' ideas and tried to ensure that new features did what people wanted as much as possible, instead of flying off the handle at the thought that someone might use a powerful new feature in a way that you didn't approve of. In an ideal world, you might even be happy if a feature turned out to do more than what you'd planned.

Lists had a lot of potential. It's too bad you've already established your ideological position and are irrationally unwilling to listen to different ideas. You can do better than this.

>61 timspalding: If Lists are any good, people will end up duplicating some CK data there anyway. But if you're adding new CK fields, other requested fields are Alternate Titles and Original Title.

61> My impression was that people would be creating the publisher series list for there own private consumption, mostly. I would have also thought a basic feature of lists would be adding a paricular BOOK to it and not just WORKS. As such, it seems completely different from what you are propsing.

>61 timspalding:
Hmm, decisive but perhaps a bit hasty. If lists are a fairly open structure it is inevitable that people will create many public lists that include my books but that I don't care to look at. So in my head (always a dangerous standard, I know) one of the main necessary features of lists is the ability to hide the ones you're not interested in. This would be a major difference from CK where whatever people enter is there in your catalog, on the work pages and on your CK stats pages (series in your library, etc.).

Work based publishers' series are going to be attractive to some people and abhorrent to others. I think it would be much better to have them in a form that allows the people who don't like them to choose not to see them.

>64 brightcopy:
My impression was that people would be creating the publisher series list for there own private consumption, mostly.

I read this after I wrote the above but before I posted. It convinces me that when we talk about lists we don't know what the hell we're talking about.

67> Yeah, pretty much what I concluded in #5.

62> People already responded to your point about editions. They don't matter nearly as much as you think.

No, I think Tim has a point...

67> If lists are a fairly open structure it is inevitable that people will create many public lists that include my books but that I don't care to look at. So in my head (always a dangerous standard, I know) one of the main necessary features of lists is the ability to hide the ones you're not interested in.

...but this demolished it.

68> I think it may be time to take a break from the subject.

>67 eromsted:, 69 So, returning to the original purpose of this thread, book-based discussions would be a much better project for now.

Straying again....

Publisher series are now live.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/102076

Now that that's out of the way, will you reconsider whether users can contribute to the discussion about lists?

Now that that's out of the way, will you reconsider your proposal to kill all dogs in the world?

Sure, if you implement the list feature the way I want it then I won't kill a single dog. Deal?

Original title and alternate titles are now live.

http://www.librarything.com/topic/102079

#62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 74, 76

That's a whole litter of kittens! The Great Old Ones, of which Tim may just be one, will be pleased. Er, …one of which, Tim may just be. Er, …one of Tim… Never mind.

//Puts tinfoil hat back on, pours another glass of wine. Begins to see the attraction in 'Professional' wrestling!//

>45 jjwilson61:

I'm the still, small voice of sanity that he regularly ignores. ;-)

The reason why software developers do not let users actually participate in the design of a feature is because users generally don't know enough about software design to participate meaningfully.

When I was doing software design, our users consistently asked for two features which logically excluded each other. No matter how many times I drew them diagrams of the data retrieval path and showed them that you couldn't have both, they would point to system A that had one feature and system B that had the other as proof that I didn't know what I was talking about.

I have to say that Lists is starting to sound even worse than that. So many things are wanted that I can't even get a picture in my head of what it would look like. The fact that Tim even has a conception of something that he thinks will work is a great thing, and all he's getting is criticism. System design is weighing tradeoffs. Maximally flexible things are usually very complicated to use. Many featured things tend to be buggy.

The other thing that I'll say is that, while I'd be happy to have annotated lists of books on certain topics, we already have this feature on LT in the wiki and hardly anyone is using it. I really got excited about it when it first came up, but then I realized just how hard it was to make a list of authoritative books on a subject, even subjects I'm well-read in. I don't think adding a lot of bells, whistles, and inter-connectivity is going to make this task any easier.

It's not like we don't have any examples of lists to work from. Probably the use of lists I like the best comes from BoardGameGeek, where lists are used for a variety of purpose. They're a bit closer actually to a forum than an actual list though: some examples -

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/60781/my-creepy-game-list
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/60754/games-i-want-in-trade
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/55843/why-you-dont-let-your-little-brother...

You can "add" an item to a list and it will pull up a link to that item in the list and you can add a comment to it. I've used it for more personal lists like "What board games should we play on the next Game Day at our house", but I've seen ones like:

I'm not entirely sure how confusing it might be with the relatively flat structure of LibraryThing talk. With thinking about it, improving touchstones would capture many of the functionality of a bgg list. (You can select the record/associated image/etc for a game)

I don't think Amazon lists are as social as bgg's where multiple people can add and annotate, but it has been a while since I've used them extensively. A fair number of Amazon's lists still seem focused on social/public sharing. I've found it useful to go in and see what people say in relation to the individual items in the list and the title/goal of the list. (Why are those your top 10 favorite science fiction books? Why are these books good for beginning brewers?) and so on. Sometimes you get information you might not necessarily get through reviews and tags, particularly as far as comparisons. For example, you could have a list and say "this is the rough reading order, but you'll want to read the chapters of book x in the list before y because it is better at this." We can kind of do this with member recommendations, but it is awkward.

I haven't decided entirely on how much I want this feature at this moment. Tags and reviews do a lot, if they were used more frequently. Lists could serve a similar purpose and maybe somehow make it easy to tag a book. But with better touchstones perhaps that would fill in some of the need of lists...

80> The reason why software developers do not let users actually participate in the design of a feature is because users generally don't know enough about software design to participate meaningfully.

Many of us in this group are more than just users, we're also software developers and designing software is what we like to do. So I would think that it would be a good group to hash out a good design.

That said, this thread isn't really the place for it. If Tim wants to get into an in-depth discussion of what a Lists feature might look like, I suggest we take it to one of the threads that Zoe posted above or start a new one.

80> It's easy to argue either side of this topic:

- Users are terrible at designing features that software developers will build.

- Software developers are terrible at designing features that users will use.

There's plenty of good reasoning and examples on each side. I am both a software developer and a user, and I can tell you I have plenty of empirical evidence. The reality is that we have to meet somewhere in the middle.

>83 brightcopy:

I think there's a big difference between criticizing a feature or a sketch of a feature and coming up with entirely new features. Criticism starts with certain bounds. New features are, aulsmith writes, a much more complicated dance. They involve questions, like data structures and performance, that are harder for users to get into.

In the case of lists, there's a basic initial question about whether lists should be a work-level feature, or some hybrid of a work- and book-level feature. (I lean toward works alone--that our list feature should be like GR's, and be focused on public, aggregated lists.) But this question isn't only about the "feature" per se. It also involves technical questions. We don't have any book-and-work structures. What it would look like? What performance and caching issues does it bring up? Etc.

More generally, I find that users don't make big leaps. Any number of major features here, but certainly works, groups, talk, CK and home pages, were low on users' radar before we made them. They didn't plug any obvious need; they created their need and even--as they expanded what LT was good for--their own users. Over and over people would say that, basically, they would not have thought of it, and didn't even like the idea when they heard of it or saw it at first, and then it became an accepted, liked and necessary part of the site for them.

Anyway, pardon me for saying it, but I think I'm the last developer in the entire world that anyone can criticize for not having robust conversations about their product. I design stuff with users here all day long. I just think that a feature like lists is not necessarily something best given their first cut by a committee.

Anyway, I'm not even saying I'll design the first cut of lists without consultation, but I'd like to have a day or two alone with pen and paper, apart from the mad hubbub, to come up with a proposal. Then you can react to it. Okay?

I'm happy to react to a design that you propose. I just think it might be worth sketching out what people are hoping to get from the feature as a preliminary phase. Look at some concrete examples of desired uses and see whether they can be made to fit into one feature.

This is not to say that users should design the feature, but that you should design the feature with users' wants in mind.

84> I hope the phrase "Anyway, pardon me for saying it, but I think I'm the last developer in the entire world that anyone can criticize for not having robust conversations about their product." wasn't because you thought I was saying that in 83 (since you tagged your post a response to that). You may have just been moving on to the more general response. But I just wanted to say that my entire point about meeting in the middle is actually what I think you already do. You bring your knowledge of how things work behind the scenes, as well as your own ideas and goals for the site. But you also listen to what the people actually using the site say and can be persuaded by them. Sometimes they convince you of things you totally opposed to begin with (collections, checkmarks). Sometimes they don't. It's a good give and take.

84: Ditto 86. What I think I meant in 80 was that you're brilliant to be able to sort through the herd of ponies that the List Feature has become and be able to see a path forward. I certainly haven't been able to.

What's your reaction going to be when you show us your plans and a lot of people say "but that won't do what we want!" Because that *is* what will happen and I hope you don't get all defensive and give up on the feature because you can't satisfy anyone.

Maybe it isn't possible to satisfy everyone, but a lot of people have been looking forward to their own idea of this feature for a long time and if what you propose doesn't work for them and it appears that you cannot make it work for them, then there will be great gnashing of teeth.

So, doing book level will be difficult. Let's find out if that's a problem. Did anyone really want a list of specific editions (besides publishers series)?

I could think of situations where specific editions might become interesting - if you're interested in a specific illustrator's works for example. But I doubt that's what people are most keen to use lists for.

89: illustrator
Actually, that's what Other Authors should be when it's finished. You enter the illustrator's name, with the Role of Illustrator, and then he has a page just like authors and it lists all the works where he's been entered as the Illustrator.

But, since it looks like that's not going to happen any time soon, it's not a bad idea to make Lists of works by illustrators (and cover designers, and translators, and...) If the person happens to have an author page, you can enter a link to the list in the links section of their page.

I like it!

(Don't expect lists of editions, though, since we don't have editions. I would guess that to be a larger project on its own than lists.)

90> We don't have editions, per se, but we do have books. As opposed to works. Books are inherently edition-specific (even if you just filled out a generic entry - you've created your own personal "edition").

So you could add your books to a list, if it supported that. It'd just be a case of if that's useful. It would probably be more useful for lists that were mostly centered around your library than lists that were somehow for public consumption. I know it's already been taken care of with the new CK field, but an example might have been publisher series. If I could add books to a list, I could have my own publisher series list and they would be tied to that specific edition. But if I wanted to share that list and have other people make use of the data, it's not as helpful because it points to my books.

That wouldn't work well for lists of books that you didn't already have in your library - reading lists, wishlists (some people have expressed a desire to use lists in preference to collections, specifically to keep the books out of their library), etc. I think restricting lists to books in your library would eliminate a lot of potential use cases. (You could, I suppose, come up with a way of adding books from other people's libraries, but that sounds like it would make the UI much more complicated than just adding works.)

Maybe there should be a poll on whether people expect lists to work with editions rather than works.

I don't and I get the feeling that no one/very few people expect that, even for publisher's series.

If Bernie Wrightson's illustrated edition of Frankenstein has been lumped in with all the other editions and a list of "Bernie Wrightson, Illustrator" showed a different cover for the book, it would still be better a better way to see works he has illustrated than we have now.

Regardless of the poll, I'd be amazed if lists worked with anything other than works. (And gobsmacked if they worked with editions.)

92> Are you thinking I'm saying Lists should ONLY allow books to be added and not works as well? That's not what I was saying.

But yeah, the UI could potentially get complex. But then again, the more you strip away a UI, the less capable a feature generally gets. The easiest to use features are generally the ones that do very little.

I think I'd mostly be fine with work-level lists.

On a more general level, I think there are two important ways to build lists socially, and both need to be incorporated:

1) A single list that can be edited by many members. Basically like CK is now. The individual contributions aren't distinguished and there's one ultimate product.

2) A composite list made up of individual users' personal lists. This would be used for things like "Best Books Read in 2010", where everyone lists the best books they read and the composite list is constructed by counting how many times each work is listed. In this case, there would be one composite list but it would also be possible to drill down to see each user's contributions. The composite list could be broken down to see "Best Books Read in 2010 according to Zoe" and "Best Books Read in 2010 according to the 75 Book Challenge group". It would also be possible to see the names of contributors for each individual entry: say, Room is #1, occurring on 50 individual lists. Click to see the names of the 50 users who listed it.

96> My first impression is that #2 wouldn't be used nearly as often as #1. Do you think that's accurate? Or is it just because I don't participate in the 75 Book Challenge group and the like?

96> #2 seems like an additional feature to me. #1 and private lists could be developed first and #2 added later.

>97 brightcopy: I'm personally far more interested in #2 than #1. There's nothing to prevent #1 from being done right now using the wiki or something, whereas #2 really needs a dedicated feature.

>99 jjwilson61: But what's the point if we can already do those things now? Like many other people, I already keep personal lists in Talk.

If Lists aren't going to do anything new, why bother with the feature at all?

Okay, wait, but in other places people said they wanted to be able to add books to lists, not just works. Help!

>99 jjwilson61: But what's the point if we can already do those things now? Like many other people, I already keep personal lists in Talk.

Okay, but keeping lists in TALK is hugely inefficient! It's not just about doing something new. It's also doing something in a not-horrible way!

>102 timspalding: It doesn't matter what people said before. It matters whether they still want that after you presented arguments about why it isn't ideal.

>103 timspalding: How is it hugely efficient? It's incredibly easy, especially now that touchstones stick. Seriously, what's wrong with this?

101> I thought the point was that it would be hooked into the rest of LT with the work page having a section for all the lists the work was in, perhaps a page saying what lists your books are in, maybe lists that are similar to each other. Ok, those last two seem kind of weak.

And when I said private above I meant that only the creator could edit it, not that only they could see it. Perhaps we can call that personal. So we have personal vs. communal lists, as well as public vs. private for who can see it.

#89

Actually it is one of my use-cases.

Not just a list of books by that illustrator - but a list of particular cover illustrations.

102> I think that people say books when they mean works a lot of the time. Or if you mean when we were talking about publishers series, well you already fixed that in a different way.

106> Would the Lists feature lose all value for you if book-level lists aren't part of the implementation?

>105 jjwilson61: Yeah, I figured you meant personal rather than really private. Like in the thread I linked to in #104?

>103 timspalding: How is it hugely efficient? It's incredibly easy, especially now that touchstones stick. Seriously, what's wrong with this?

Sorry, it's inefficient because you don't have them all in one place. It's not aggrevating in any way. There's no way to search it, sort it, see covers, etc. It's the difference between keeping your data in a text file and in a database.

#107

Yes - you are right of course.

As another idea how about if the lists contained references to a work (LT terminology) but you could choose which of the available covers for each work to display (assuming that lists will show a cover image)? If you don't choose it auto-picks the most popular one.

For the record, I never said *I* want to be able to add both books and works. I just presented that being able to add books rather than only works opens up more functionality.

Question here for Tim - do you actually feel like Lists are something YOU would use much? Do you have a need for them that you've noticed?

>110 timspalding: Do people even want to search personal lists like that? I thought the whole point of the supertouchstones was the people kept complaining that challenge threads weren't interesting!

You can at least see covers, though. I didn't add them to the summary because they would take up too much space, but they're there in the thread.

Anyway, displaying our existing lists in new ways is a pretty boring goal for a social feature (the vote was about collective list-making, right?). I want to create community data that wouldn't exist otherwise, aggregating personal lists into something more.

And I'm actually a bit confused now, because it seems like you want this too. What kind of aggregating did you have in mind, if not something like my #2?

>110 timspalding: Tim, I'm not trying to snark, really I'm not. But it's a case where a typo could be making a *big* difference.

Do you mean "aggreGating" or "aggrAvating"?

I think I understand, but please clarify.

110> Sorry, it's inefficient because you don't have them all in one place. It's not aggrevating in any way.

I assume you meant aggregating? Although sometimes Zoe can be aggravating.

>111 andyl: I'd definitely like a way to choose the cover.

>115 jjwilson61: No, he was agreeing with me, saying that using Talk for personal lists, while potentially inefficient, was at least not aggravating! ;)

Question here for Tim - do you actually feel like Lists are something YOU would use much? Do you have a need for them that you've noticed?

I'd like to contribute to various best of, worst of and offbeat lists, and to watch them. I want a list of books that have terrible sequels, for example. Or one of best non-Lovecraft Cthulhu books. Or novels that have the author as a character. Etc.

I have no interest in making lists for my own books—that's an easy tag feature.

I'd like to contribute to various best of and offbeat lists, and to watch them.

Agreed.

But surely the best-of lists would work by ranking items based on how many users listed them as best?

118> Okay, just curious. You seem to be in the same boat as I am. I don't really have a lot of use for lists for my own books, either. Sometimes I wonder if this makes my opinion on some of these topics a little different.

ETA: Also wanted to say - I keep coming up with examples and then thinking "couldn't I just create a tag for that and apply it and get the same result?"

But surely the best-of lists would work by ranking items based on how many users listed them as best?

Or included them on the list, or whatever. I could see the list being ranked by how many users said it, or voted it up and down post nomination, or allow members to make their own "top 10 books of the 1870s" and have a global one that brings the data together.

Okay, just curious. You seem to be in the same boat as I am. I don't really have a lot of use for lists for my own books, either. Sometimes I wonder if this makes my opinion on some of these topics a little different.

The question is, what is the list-making for. For yourself? To show others? To show and compare with others? Etc.

I could see the list being ranked by how many users said it, or voted it up and down post nomination, or allow members to make their own "top 10 books of the 1870s" and have a global one that brings the data together.

I think the first and last options are equivalent. If people "said it", then they're essentially listing it on their own personal version of the list.

I'd prefer one of those methods to the voting up and down option, because I think they provide more options for viewing the data (looking at people's personal lists, looking at all the people who listed a certain title, looking at subsets of the composite list based on group membership). Why create just a final product when we could create lots of interesting sublists at the same time?

Also, I'm more interested in constructive additions ("this book should go on this list") than in negative votes.

122> Do you include personal lists that get aggregated into a communal list?

>124 jjwilson61: I was thinking personal lists for the purpose of personal lists.

Example: "Top 10 books of the 1870s"

125> I voted yes because even though I'm not terribly interested in making personal lists, I might be interested in the lists that others make.

For what it's worth, you're not getting this next. Next is going to be site-wide search. Casey came free from his library project, and we've been working on it today.

We made enormous progress today. I've got it working on about half the data types we have—tags, subjects, members, reviews, etc.

Best of all, it'll be fast enough that, even if we're showing only one type—like works—it'll show counts for all the others.

There's still a lot of work to do. Casey is working on tweaking the results to be as good as we can make it. And we have to push maybe 50 million items into it. But it's looking up, and should be done in less than two weeks, I'll tell you.

For a moment there, I thought you said Casey *was tweaking*!! I'm all for an efficiency drive but medicating the staff with illegal narcotics to achieve it might be a step too far ;-))

But it's looking up,...

Well, that's what searches are supposed to do.

> 128

Hooray! Better searching is way high at the top of my list anyway and I am thrilled to hear it is coming along swimmingly!

I voted yes because even though I'm not terribly interested in making personal lists, I might be interested in the lists that others make. (#127)

I might well be using personal lists, but then again I might not. But I voted "yes" for the same reason you did: other people's lists might well be interesting.

>128 timspalding: Site-Wide Search

w00t!

Posting here because this was the most recent active discussion about lists....

It would be really nice if users could define parameters for lists to be generated automatically from LT data. For example, I'd like to see the top 100 books by rating with original publication date 2010, restricted to books with at least 50 ratings.

I'd also like to see an option to "recommend" (i.e., thumb) lists, with the names of the thumbers revealed and a place on the profile to see which lists people had thumbed. I'd like to be able to see the most-thumbed lists and the most-thumbed recent lists, along with other sorts: most recent, most viewed, most active (based on entries), most talked about (assuming some sort of annotations/comments will be allowed), etc.

134>

So, basically, you want to be able to do arbitrary SQL queries against the works database?

I'd like that too, but that's not just a pony, that's a unicorn pegasus. :-)

>136 lorax: Yup, but that's what Tim gets for saying that users can't think big. I might as well imagine the feature that I'd like to see instead of focusing on what seems practical.

It might be possible with certain restrictions....

Sounds like Smart Lists.