ActiveRain Wishlist

compiled and moderated by Craig Daniels (email me craigda at gmail to add/edit)

last updated 14-June-2011

Associates Group - Ability to Rename

suggested by Craig Daniels

When you first start out, you don’t really understand how your associates groupings work -

later you are stuck with whatever you first did as a newbie! You can neither delete nor rename an associates group. (rename alone would be fine, delete may cause problems if you did not have an empty group...)

Subscribers - Notification Email

suggested by Craig Daniels

system to send a notification email when somebody new subscribes

Subscribers - Search and Sort

suggested by Craig Daniels

It would be nice to search to see if somebody is subscribed to you. Also, the subscribers list now is in “random” order. (mine is anyway) It would be nice to be able to display the “date subscribed” field and name field as headings that were clickable to change the search order by these options.

Search Groups
suggested by Craig Daniels

Groups needs a complete rethink (“activerain 2.0”) It is nearly impossible to find if group already exists. The result is that users create a new group when they could have just joined an existing group. This happened to us recently with vblogging. Other examples are the newly formed iPad group, when there was already one formed. Users should join existing groups instead of forming their own!

Social Blog - Fix strange  Chars
suggested by Craig Daniels/John Novak

strange characters happen on social blog feed and also community pages, example

https://activerain.com/states/NV/cities/Las%20Vegas/communities/Southern%20Highlands

needs corrected page encoding declaration - relates to HTML   (non-break space) chars

similar knowledge base article here -

Blog Post Editor - Start in Draft Mode

suggested by Barbara Hensley and “everyone” :)

when editing a blog post, draft mode should be the default status

so when you save your work it does not go “public”

Spam Comment Blocking Algorithm

suggested by Craig Daniels

spam is a problem on posts, sometimes is a person “just getting points” w/o actually reading the post - this is frequently a repeated copy/paste comment just for the points, something like:

This is an excellent post! Thank you for sharing this post.

If the system queried last 10 comments by the user and if new comment matches any of the previous 10, then denies as “spam” (dev note: 10 is variable but enough sampling to not bog down the system in large queries)

Stats - Sort By Headings

suggested by Leah Stern

rather than have to export to Excel to sort columns, it would be nice to click on column headings to sort. For instance, sort by clicks to find the most popular topics

Social Blog View

suggested by Leah Stern

ability to click to comments link at the bottom of article (now you have to scroll back to top of article to add a new comment to the post)

Sent Items View Messages

suggested by Craig Daniels

When you send a message via AR contact form, there is no way for you to view your sent items afterward. The system must save the messages because the recipient can recall messages from their home page.

YouTube Embeds Handling

suggested by Alan May

When you switch to HTML view to put a YouTube embed into your post, you can NOT switch back to WYSIWYG mode afterward. If you do, your embed gets trashed!

Better Blog Editor (more formatting tools)

suggested by Alan May

“Everybody” uses scribefire to pick font choices, colors and sizes. Why not just allow the AR editor to do all these things built-in? (Karen Fiddler: “and ability to switch between HTML/WYSIWYG w/o having to “post” the article first) -

Featured Posts Listing

suggested by Alan May

When you hover over a featured post star below the member avatar, it shows you how many posts by this user have been featured. Why not make it an action item to list these posts so that new subscribers can go back and catch up on the “best of...”

Direct Contact Message - Link to Sender’s Page

suggested by Alan May

If you receive a "direct contact" from a fellow rainer, you have to go find their profile. The message should always provide link back to the person to better be able to follow up. (possible option also to “reply” to sender via AR message)

Avatars Missing on Comments

suggested by Craig Daniels

A while back the avatar photos stopped appearing on activerain main blog as well as activebob’s blog. This makes reading the comments much harder not “seeing” who is making the comment

Subscribe Button

suggested by Craig Daniels

Subscribe button should not launch you off of the page of the person that you just subscribed to!