Put your money where your mouth is

You have $100 spend on site improvements. Tim will implement the improvements that pay the most (for the purposes of this thread, not necessarily in reality). How would you distribute the $100 between various improvements?

For ease of compilation, try to choose improvements that appear on the list of polls, so that it's clear when two improvements are the same. If the improvement you want hasn't been listed there, add a new poll.

It would also be much appreciated if you could use round-ish numbers. Think hard about whether there's a meaningful difference between $0.50 and $0.51.

Seriously?

I'd pay all $100 to stop these damn polls.

I'm not sure why gathering data about user priorities is such a terrible thing.

I'm not sure about the amounts involved, and at the moment I would certainly not fork out $ 100. But I would seriously consider paying extra if it meant we could get full separation of authors with the same name, and for "other authors" getting their author pages.

p.s.: I admit to having a vested interest in the latter.

Here's my list. Hopefully I managed to add correctly.

$10 Lists
$10 "Books Read This Month" feature
$10 A field for who recommended/told you about the book
$10 Option to connect Currently Reading with the Date fields

$5 Finish reading timeline
$5 A discussion forum for each work
$5 Date Acquired in Quick Edit
$5 Ability to customize Quick Edit (I really only need one of this and Date Acquired added to Quick Edit, but I'm hedging my bets)
$5 A field for where you got the book
$5 Read and comment on RSI threads
$5 A weekly update about what's being worked on

$2 Show books read in Connection News
$2 Print view for recommendation lists
$2 Bring back Tag Mirror
$2 Ability to filter Talk based on group tags
$2 A default Read collection
$2 Add generic editions in one step with the green plus

$1 clean up search results
$1 Ability to exclude certain collections from All Books
$1 Add a search box at the top of every page
$1 Bring back Common Knowledge short form
$1 Allow fields to be stacked within display columns
$1 Add a quotations trivia game
$1 Allow searching on the Date fields
$1 Touchstones that distinguish between discussions and mentions

$0.50 Add a trivia game from CK data
$0.50 Featured Bookshelf
$0.50 Polls that allow other answers
$0.50 List of ER books we requested
$0.50 Ability to sort Local bookstores by number of people who have favourited them
$0.50 Add a Copyright Data field in CK
$0.50 Minor edit to wording of Blurbers blurb
$0.50 Change name of Stopped back to Finished
$0.50 Ability to upload more than 25 photos (value contingent on how many more; I will not pay anything to have the limit increased to 26)
$0.50 LT staff should use some sort of feature request tracking system

It's interesting how this works. I found myself unwilling to pay much for improvements that seem very easy, even if I do want them. I was also unwilling to pay for things that I knew plenty of other people wanted more. And I didn't bother wasting my money on things that aren't going to happen.

ETA for my own reference: features that I do really want to see but forgot to add at the time.
-consolidate member recommendations
-remember sort separately for reviews on profile subpage and reviews on work page
-better sorting/filtering/displaying of CK
-individual catalogue columns for collections, with checkmarks
-ability to filter for-user recommendations by rating

>4 Nicole_VanK: I didn't mean to imply that any money would actually change hands, though it's an interesting possibility.

> 6: Yeah, I understand.

All $100 toward making it easier to add a book and put it in the right collection.

I'm going to splash mine around in big chunks as well.

$40 Contains/is contained in
$20 Collections aware export (and general collections awareness)
$20 Green/pink 'plus' adds generic edition

That's all I really need, so..

$20 $19.50 Donation to LT cheese & wine party!
50¢ for a bone for the werewolf below!

Ooh, bribery, good idea...

Bribery! I'll be sipping wine and nibbling cheese right along with them. I changed my amounts with you in mind.

Much appreciated.

Yeah. I'd rather not do this in text. It will cut down who participates too much.

OK, you go and develop a whole page for it, but it's coming out of the wine and cheese money, you know that?

ETA: re-read = add smileys ;)

top value, $20. I think it would be highly beneficial to LT *and* I would greatly like it:
- $20 lists

middling value, 6 items at $6 each -- things I would greatly like and would be cool for LT but not necessarily a huge draw:
- $6 book-by-book privacy
- $6 contents just display & make editable the contents in CK, without worrying about the full relational aspect right now
- $6 cover management page information / data about individual covers, tied to editions & images -- i.e., illustrator, designer
- $6 multiple authors / unique authors
- $6 record replacement
- $6 open cataloging

middling value -- 4 items at $5 each. These are things that would probably be a good draw / improvement for LT, or an interesting new direction; I would enjoy them but they're not key for me:
- $5 dedicated thread / forum / whatever for each book / author
- $5 quotes trivia game
- $5 user journaling / reviewing
- $5 "recently read" or "currently reading"

low value -- 8 items at $3 each. Of interest or great interest to hard-core LTers (catalogers or social users). May or may not advance some particular LT interest:
- $3 group catalog searching
- $3 browsing CK data
- $3 where you found out about it field link to users, publishers, events, places, "other"
- $3 CK alternative titles
- $3 CK copyright data
- $3 reading log page numbers
- $3 export all fields
- $3 user-defined fields

I think lilithcat is hinting that since we already have a forum for bug reports as well as a forum for site suggestions, that the additional of polls as well as a couple of threads discussing theose polls is kind of pointless. Especially since many of the threads on those two subforums have gotten ignored by staff.

Not disagreeing or agreeing here. Just explaining how it looks to me. Of course having just reported a spammer who started back in May and is still going in September kind of makes me have a bias.

Here's my current list.

Big pet peeve:
$20.00 - Fixable subject headings. At an absolute bare-bones minimum, this would mean getting rid of infernal idiocy stupidity like "Large type books" from my copies of books in my catalog. Ideally, I'd also be able to merge/propose for merger headings that are identical except for stray punctuation* and headings that are foreign-language equivalents of headings they duplicate**. Also good would be the ability to fix other subject crap like a certain Gaskell work being listed as a pictorial work about a town in New Jersey.

Other important stuff
$15.00 - Filter automatic recommendations by collection
$15.00 - Other Authors for all books

Moderately important
$10.00 - "No, thanks" events on home page
$10.00 - Fuzzy dates
$10.00 - Clean up editions page

Ho-hum and/or not particularly important
$5.00 - Fix "why"-free recommendations bug
$5.00 - Tag bundling
$5.00 - Lists
$0.50 - Generic editions
$0.50 - Alternate titles CK field

Keep the change
$4.00 (total) - stuff I missed





* Like the "Joan of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431" with "Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431" headings seen here.
** See also, the second example here.

This would take more time than I have right now, but I don't think the point of using imaginary dollars is served if you are reluctant to spend it for simple things. Maybe it would be better to just think of it as 100 points to express how much you want a feature.

$50 to go toward a 2 week bug fixing spree
$25 to go toward finishing projects such as contains/ contained in
$25 toward lists a the new fun project.

Yeah. I'd rather not do this in text. It will cut down who participates too much.

How else would you do it?

http://twitter.com/librarythingtim/status/24445636489

Thanks for that link. Is there any reasonable way to create such a store?

I don't think so. People have pointed to UserVoice, but I don't like it for various reasons. I'm tempted to try it here. But not today. I'm working on systems.

Haven't got a clue, sorry.

So now Tim will (soon) be off either trying to set up and configure a web store or wind up coding his own.

*facepalm*

Yeah, I don't see the problem with text. I recommend that we continue to post here.

I'm honestly surprised at the amount of people (here and at the other thread) that want lists so much. I always thought it was more of a "talked about but majority don't care" type of thing. Huh.

Okay, here's mine:

$60 fix ALL long-standing bugs (been around 2+ months)
$15 finally finish seperating same-named authors
$10 bring back Tag Mirror, fully functional
$10 easier access to ALL features (not having to go thru 6 pages to find one feature would be sooo nice)
$5 either do away with the dang green plus sign altogether or allow it to add a generic edition directly from the work page

OK, this thread is just a rehashing & rebranding of the goddawful polls thread. Seriously? Hypothetical money? This is just daft. It's not like these threads are bringing anything to the table that's really novel & that hasn't been said many times over.

I think this sort of thing is a great idea. The LT admin/workers can only spread themselves so thin, and I think knowing which of the *many* requested features are *most* wanted by users would be a good thing.

>28 klarusu: I hadn't previously seen a convenient summary of users' RSI preferences. I'm not sure why you're so against efficient user input. Wouldn't it be nice if Tim could devote more time to developing the features users want than to trying to guess what was wanted?

It would be nice to have a better way of listing, prioritizing/voting, and commenting on proposals. The last thread just got really long, and after voting on the first few, I just don't have the time or energy to go through the rest of the thread and vote on every little proposal. If there were a central place where this happened, with a better interface (say, one that ranked "top suggestions" etc., allowed people to search for things already suggested) I might be better able to weigh in on what I'd like, what I'd prioritize. In thread format it's just overwhelming.

PS - another site I visit uses "getsatisfaction.com" for user feedback and suggestions. Maybe that would be an alternative to UserVoice, which I don't really know.

$50 Full other-author functionality without losing the data I already have.

$25 Ability to change existing Amazon-derived data to Overcat data without losing original date of entry

$10 Unique authors

$5 Designate individual books as private

$5 Make it easier to sort editions on combine/separate pages

$5 Keep on coming up with new great ideas!

$50 Work on only existing bugs for three months, prioritized by some method based on how hard they are to fix and how many people/pages are affected

$50 Beer for Tim

$40 for killing bugs and finishing off existing features.
$25 for getting multiple author information for all of my books.
$15 for splitting author pages.
$10 for getting back collections info on work pages.
$10 tag mirror.

You folks have taken care of the other things. I'm just going to throw the whole $100 at fixing touchstones.

Robert

>35 Mr.Durick:
Would you like to borrow $4 to add to that? I've got some spare change.

$60 for Author Splits
$40 for a bug tracking, recommendation tracking, what's being worked on now system

ETA: I had originally voted for fixing Other Authors for the long-term members who have these fields in two formats, but it occurred to me that there is no functionality to Other Authors, so the format of the data doesn't really matter. Therefore, I've change my priorities.

I am a simple, unsophisticated person:

$40 to fix the multiple-authors-with-the-same-name-on-a-single-page problem.
$40 to be able to choose NOT to add wishlist books to my authors and other statistics.
$20 out of the goodness of my heart to fix all the other things around here that you folks talk about, but I don't understand. EXCEPT publishers. I don't understand what that feature does at all.

Thanks for asking. K4k

I'm splitting my imaginary money between fixing bugs and new features:

$28 - Some way of recognizing multiple authors or contributors.
$15 - Separate pages for authors with the same name
$5 - Make author search usable (because right now it's so messy, it's practically useless.)
$2 - Contains/Contained-in relationship

$20 - Make venue pictures work again
$20 - Fix the bug that deletes author pictures when they're edited
$5 - Fix "Always alphabetize tags"
$5 - Fix author pics zeitgeist

$55 for a working Timeline as it can be seen under "http://www.oldforest.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=52&Itemid=20" from Old Forest

$35 for multiple authors

$10 coffee und sweets for the LT-workers

$50 for container / contained implementation

$40 for multiple-authors-with-same-name solution

$5 for dedicated thread / forum for each author / book

$5 for bug fixes.

I like *big* ponies ;-)

Here's mine:

$20 to go through Bug Collectors and RSI and comment on every thread with an active bug/suggestion, even if it's "Nope, not going to do it"

$15 to finish Other Authors
$15 to give Split Authors their own pages
$5 to clean up author search results (show main author name highlighted, names combined in given less prominence)

$10 to finish new Pictures work - for Venues
$10 to fix Author blank Canonical Name bug
$10 to ignore blank and deprecated authors when combining works

$5 to clean up editions page (fixing doubled count, merging all apparently identical editions including zero-copy editions)
$5 for Date Acquired in Quick Edit (on Add Books page)

$5 to the LT Staff party fund

I would put my $100 in migrating those forums to a proper bug tracking/feature request management system, with voting capabilities :)

$100 - Rebuild/recode the entire cataloguing portion of the site to accomodate 5 years of reasonable requests for functionality.

1. I would spend $40.00 to fix the bugs

2. I would spend $40.00 to complete all the half-done features

3. I would spend $20.00 to bring Tag Watch back.

Not sure if its 1 or 2, so I will give it a number for itself.

Ninety-nine dollars for improved handling of multiple authors and other authors. DONE 2011-11-01

Three quarter-dollars for generic editions. Like Heather19 said in Message 27, if we cannot have a one-click basic generic edition, then "do away with the dang green plus sign altogether".

Twenty-four cents toward a discussion thread for each work. This could be very useful, I think. But please give Other Authors the credit they deserve first, before tackling this feature request.

One cent for an updated picture system, that counts and credits uploaded covers. It should at least track who uploaded what. A badge for scanned covers would be nice, too.

Can I just buy books and wait patiently for authors with the same name to get sorted out?

At this stage, I'd be tempted to put the whole $100 into the improved handling of multiple authors.

I would also appreciate a better handling of the language versions. I try to read English books in original language, but I also read a lot of French-language books, which is why my default LT language is French. I would like to be able to easily switch from the French translation suggestion I automatically get to the original language ones I need.

So, let's say $60 for multiple authors, $40 for language versions. Although I have the feeling that, cost-wise, it should be the other way around.

$50 1-click add this book to my library (to a predefined collection which you can designate as default)

$50 container/contained implementation

$65 hierarchical/nested/bundled tags
$25 Talk organization tools
$10 generic work that can be be filled in later with specific edition

And when those are done, I'd pay for other stuff.

2 (lilithcat), 28 (klarusu): I like these threads. Don't know how much they affect what TPTB do, but I find it useful to see what other members care about, all collected together.

So far, I owe LibraryThing $2.50 ;)

$0.50 at the moment from me. The only thing that's changed is that we can now include alternate titles.

I'm thinking about using some of that "spare change" I mentioned to up the value on this bug. Maybe if I do so, it will just get fixed already so I can shut up about it and go back to more interesting problems like crappy subject headings and how Other Authors is still only about a third of the way done.

Multiple authors per work is done, at last! How can I give $99 to LibraryThing—buying stamps?