Hi guys. Come on in, we're open again.

The nature of this node is going to be a bit different than what it was before. This is now an area to talk to the coders and the coders only about what you want e2 to be. What this means is that anything that you think has to change about e2 can't be anything that requires approval from Upper Management. Small stuff only. Cleaning up and mopping. Making the whole experience slightly more pleasant for our dear users. The cherry on top. The icing on the cake.

Here's an example of what could have been in this node:

"Dudes, Message Inbox really sucks. It's essentially useless unless you diligently keep on deleting all your messages all the time. I have over 9000 messages, and this makes it impossible for Message Inbox to ever finish loading. Can you fix it so it only displays a few messages at a time?"

Of course, that has been done. Message Inbox now only displays 100 messages at at time unlike our barbaric past, and it could probably still use other interface improvements.

Here's an example of what really isn't appropriate for this node:

"The whole XP system is really wrong. Here's my new scientifically-tested validation method that will change everyone's level, will eliminate the need for chings, and grants completely different level powers based on only 5 levels."

You get the idea. The less intrusive and controversial your proposed change, the more likely it is to get done quickly by some coder with too much time on her hands. Don't worry too much about how difficult your idea would be to code up, but do try to keep your suggestions short and simple. Think of this node as an extension of e2 bugs but not for things that are obviously wrong, only for things that could be improved.

Thank you.

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My favorite Suggestion for E2 of all time:


"You know what would be kinda cool, at least for sick individuals like myself? Near the chatterbox maybe, set up a meter or something that updates the current estimated births, deaths, and the overall number of people on the planet generally."


submitted by sin verguenza, 10/28/2000

• Control over the location of the Chatterlight notifications nodelet (other than with absolute positioning in the CSS)

Having multiple 'Personal Links' nodelettes. And be able to title them as you wish. And making 'Vitals' and 'epicenter' be editable in the same way as is 'personal links'.

An option for bigger blab boxes.

Perhaps a hit counter on nodeshells? Then we could have your nodeshells sortable by hits. It might also be very motivating to have a top ten list of 'most searched for nodeshells'.

An option to have blind voting booth show a node at a time rather than just a writeup.

Perhaps having the re, blab box, and "sent writeup message" pop to the top of the writeup after voting so that you don't have to keep scrolling down. (I might well be the only person who cares about this...)

I personally would love an option to have votes converted automatically from my GP stock after I run out of votes for the day: have the epicenter say 'out of votes', but keep the vote buttons on the writeups I visit. Any time I vote E2 gift shop would automatically deduct one GP from my account. (The more I think about this the more I want it.)

A minor complaint, but the notifications sidebar does not drop notifications for node notes once the node note is deleted. This is the equivalent of a broken link, but because the node is still there the link is not dead, only useless.

Perhaps one level bonus (or just plain feature) could be the ability to put a "preferred bookmark" on your homenode -- essentially a 'window' to the writeup in the style of cream of the cool. Not actually something I'm burning to have myself, but it came to me suddenly in a vision, and I thought I'd pass it on.

A way to see who you've sanctified, and how many times.

Link view currently shows nodeshells in brown, but in large nodes (like noders' poetry and Humorous Writings of E2) it can still be time consuming to pick these out. Since the links in link view are not in alphabetical order anyway, why not order them nodeshells first and then filled nodes? (my preference would also be to move non-noded links to the top of the page rather than the bottom, as that is the more important information).

Also, Suggestions for E2 and E2 bugs should probably be allowed to have softlinks at the bottom. This is exactly the sort of node that we want people to find in as many was as possible.

I'd really love to know how many times a writeup of mine has been hit with "I like this!" Could a counter be kept next to the cool counter? E.g., 4C!, 12L! I'd also like to know how many times a writeup's been bookmarked or ed-cooled.

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Comment by in10se
I have a sandbox which calculates "ilikeit"s at in10se's sandbox4. We can clean this up and officially release it as a new superdoc (with a better title), or use the concepts to do more of what hapax wants.

An option for users to specifically decline receiving notifications about discussions from certain usergroups would be rather handy. A busy discussion tends to push everything else off of the notification nodelet.

However, I think a better solution, though probably more complex, would be to allow the user to manually remove notifications from that nodelet, i.e. mark them as 'read' so they don't appear any more.

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A preview mode for usergroup discussion posts would be nice, but definitely not critical.

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I would like to see nodeshells get the same deletion treatment as regular nodes. That is, at minimum, I'd like to be notified when a nodeshell of mine is deleted, as well as who has deleted it.

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It's probably on the books already, but being able to choose a criteria for sorting the Other Users list would be nice.

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Timestamps on C!s when viewing a list of nodes a particular user has C!ed

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On nodes that have been marked for destruction, we should be able to see both what the current rep of the node and the editor who marked the node.

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Can I have a /lick command? No special reason, I just think we should be able to lick noders.

There are still a lot of tables here. Getting rid of the remaining tables, tightening up the HTML so there are fewer extraneous wrappers around elements, and using classes and IDs more deliberately would go a long way toward making a better interface possible.

Also, as far as the interface, condense FAQs and administrative functions (Epicenter, Vitals, etc.) and make them available as a drop-down menu. Reserve the right bar for status stuff like Other Users, New Writeups, and the catbox. Move current user information from the Epicenter to the top of the page so it's always available but not pushing other content down.

Remove "printable version" links and use a print stylesheet.

Allow creation of untitled scratchpads.

here's a simple but useful one...make it possible to "archive" messages from within the chatterbox nodelet itself, without having to go to message inbox every time...

How about an archiving quote feature, like select any text snippet on e2 and it creates an attributed quote that you can paste anywhere. It also automatically archives each quote into an indexed quotes table or somesuch.
THE PROJECT WILL HAVE THIS, SO IF YOU WANT TO KEEP UP...

Ah, how about a (cc) in the Message Inbox? That'd be neat. As it is now you can only cc yourself from a wu, or from a noder's homenode.

• I think it would be nice if Findings: could indicate whether a node is a nodeshell. Sometimes I don't care, but frequently I'd like to know whether there's anything there before I decide what to click on.

  Update: Findings: now shows nodeshells in italics, thanks to rootbeer277 and Swap. Awesome!

  • Come to think of it, why not do the same for softlinks? Also done!
  • And hardlinks? (Or perhaps not—I'm currently styling nodeshells using the :after pseudo-element in css, and while it's fine in a list of links, it really wouldn't look nice inside a writeup. But other treatments might look better.)
  That other place does something like this (using the colour of the link as an indicator), but we'd have to implement it differently. For them, it's about whether the page exists. With findings and softlinks, we know the node exists; the question is whether there are any writeups in it. With hardlinks, it's more complicated, because the presence of a hardlink does not guarantee the existence of a node.

alex sez: Show and order by writeup count for e2node results for logged-in users maybe? Reasonable or too many hits on the nodegroup table?

• I like a lot of the suggestions above, too, but the one that I've really been wishing for already is mauler's. Archiving messages from the Catbox would be great.

I'd like to see it made easier to treat an author's writeups as a "collective work". Any chance of making the "list author" page more navigable? What I would really like, is that when you are on the page for a specific writeup (not node) you could navigate backwards and forwards through that author's whole body of work with arrows on the top line... So I could just go through, for instance, Augustine's body of work in sequence without a mess of tabs and an indexing page.

This might prove a disincentive to asamothing, too, since old writeups wouldn't be sitting quite as much in isolation.

mauler says: I really like this idea, I wonder how hard it would be to implement...

alex sez: Probably not as simple as it sounds. Users have some writeups that form a logical sequence and many that do not. I'd expect that most writers would not want their writeups treated as a collective work. It also does not work for collaborations by multiple authors. An alternative would be to set up a "forward/backward" table in which a user can manually enter the preceding and following instalment of a writeup series, thus giving the user complete control over the feature and making it easier to detect gaps. I'm not sure that any other way of doing it would be useful or popular.

I'm not sure of your policy on robots, but I thought you might want to consider saving yourself some bandwidth (and possibly helping out your search engine rankings) with a robots.txt like this:

Allow: /index.html
Allow: /title
Allow: /user
Disallow: /

This would prevent robots from getting the exact same write-ups several times (as a concatenated node, then again as a separate page for each write-up, then a printable version, then a link view version.

Similarly, getting the code to give HTTP status code 404 instead of 200 for the "Nothing Found" pages would prevent most robots from downloading them.

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Comment by in10se
The concept of this suggestion is good, and has been brought up several times in the past. Unfortunately, robots.txt is probably not a viable solution for the problem. Specifically in reference to the example above, the robots.txt standard does not allow "Allow:" lines - only "Disallow:". Even if it did, any well-behaved spider would give preference to the "Disallow:" lines, and therefore not index our site at all under those rules.

Even though it won't help withour bandwidth, it might be beneficial to our PageRank to add a meta tag of "NOINDEX" to individual writeup nodes though.

I have many suggestions, the best one I can think of right now is to create a system of icons for "my achievements" that could be displayed optionally on a user's homenodes. Nothing too big, just little .png images to show the things in "my achievements", as well as on completion of a quest.

alex sez: Already part of the plan. Haven't found designers and coding time for it yet.

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My second suggestion would be that the level names be renamed, with much more input from the users. I know that the fashionable opinion is to say that "XP is an imaginary number given to you as strangers, treat it as such", but I actually have some emotional investment in the work I do here on e2. When all of us from e2 meet in our secret global conspiracy meetings, ala Seele in Neon Genesis Evangelion, I don't think we should greet each other as Poobah. Or even Grand Poobah. Apparently this belongs somewhere else, and my complaint came at the wrong time.

mauler says: GF, please don't imply that level titles were simply imposed without much input from users. I had a node up for quite a while in Novemebr so that users could comment on the level titles, and numerous noders took advantage. I took pretty much all reasonable suggestions for name changes. Some people actually felt there weren't *enough* silly titles like "poobah." You can't please everyone, I guess.

I would love it if there were a link somewhere that would direct people to a list of recently updated Home Nodes. Each user could have the option of staying out of the list, but that would save a lot of clicking around.

More ideas for the message inbox:

Searching through that thing is horribly difficult and I was thinking: maybe a search option would be a decent addition?

Here is the problem: I can't find messages that are in reply to a node of mine, unless I go through them all and scan all of my messages. This is a pain. I would like to suggest a "show by reply" option, wherein I can type the name of the node and it displays all the messages that are in reply to that. If that were implemented, I would like to suggest that it would also encompass replies to scratchpad titles. (Depending how you do this, I guess this wouldn't be a problem.)

However, much more useful (in my mind) would be a simple search option. (I have been told this would take a while to actually do any searching on, but I figure, pain of slowness is better than the pain of manually searching.)

Supposing a user once sent me a message containing the word "peanuts" and all I could remember was that word, well, I'd like to find that message again! Scanning through the inbox would be terrible, when looking for just one word. So in that case a search option would be wonderful!

I would hope for a search option to work with the "show from user(group)"/"hide from user(group)" options as well.

I would prefer the search option, but I don't know what my fellow noders would rather, or what you would prefer to code. Please question me if you aren't sure what exactly I am thinking of.

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Another idea that has been suggested by Tem42, and I think would be brilliant, is this:

Messages about a writeup 'stick' to that writeup -- when you went to edit a writeup you might see (in a separate nodelet or right under the blab box on your writeup) all the messages sent from that wrtiteup. They would, of course, disappear when you deleted them. No need to search at all.

I think that, when editing a w/u, this would be highly useful. Rather than swapping tabs/windows to see all the spelling errors someone has found, they are right beneath it. Not sure how hard it would be to do, though...

How about keeping track of notifications? Certainly beyond 20 or 30 is not needed, but sometimes they get pushed off too fast and you'll want to know what happened when. I suggest a small link to "Notifications archive" in the bottom right-hand corner of the nodelet.

I've been (gasp) considering adding some information to my home node so I went to edit it for the first time in, oh let's say, ever. I was immediately struck with the fact that the text box for the home node information has no WYSIWYG option or even the handy buttons we have for the non-WYSIWYG writeups (the bold, italicize, link, list buttons, etc.) This may be a difficult request or an easy one, I don't know, but it seems logical that, since we have those features for write ups and scratch pads, we should have those features for editing the home node as well. Especially for those of us who don't exactly know all but the most basic HTML by heart.

• cc on msg box: I second DimView's request for this; I may have inspired it.

• No borders on user-coded tables. When I submitted July 4, 2009, text floated magically in the cells and columns where I placed them, with no visible strings and wires. I was able to add borders where I felt them appropriate, by using the <table>'s "border" attribute.

  An hour or two later, someone apparently changed the CSS for tables such that every cell has a thin border. While I agree there may be situations where this looks nice, I feel it destroys some subtle options for placing text that would otherwise be empowered by <table>. Case in point, my WU looks butt ugly now – was that effect intended? I'd like to see this change undone, please.

• Voting on Suggestions for E2. Was it a management decision that this corner of E2 doesn't have voting?

Please add e2bugs and suggestions for E2 to the vitals section, or in another easily noticeable location on the front page. Right now the only indications that these are the correct places to post bugs and suggestions are buried in news messages and homenodes, which is annoying the coders due to users understandably assuming that messaging one of them is the thing to do when no access to the reporting mechanisms is available, unless you already know both that they exist and the node names with which to access them.

To (possibly) make life a little easier for stylesheet designers, is it feasible to insert links (with CSS selectors) to the major sections of E2 into the code of every page (hidden by default)?

I'm thinking anything currently in a nodelet, plus a couple of things not presently covered like News for Noders and Cool User Picks. This would make consistent styling without nodelets more possible, and also make it possible to write themes that don't rely on particular nodelets being enabled/disabled by the user.

Pageload-wise, perhaps a more efficient alternative could be to provide NFN and CUP nodelets. Having said that, there's something to be said for making possible themes that can work with all nodelets turned off.

Sorta-related, I think it would also be useful if CSS selectors could be added to the entries in the 'vitals' nodelet, and/or (as above) if they could be made available outside the nodelet structure.