Good thought seedplanter. Thanks for the suggestion.

Good man! I love your ideas.

All good suggestions, seedplanter. And why are really old stories still listed on "These stories need you"?

Surely there's some that would be better there. Who decides? And if they're paid, why aren't they doing a better job?

And on top of that, how do you add more to the first story and get some credit for it? except by comments. that's not good enuff. 

I miss the 'Shout Out'!

You had a shout-out system? *pout*  Why was it taken away?
         ~ Swan

Hi Folks,

Re: Software Problems / Suggestions for the NowPublic.com site:

Sorry for putting this here; I'm not sure where to put it (feel free to move it if possible.)

• I guess everybody knows by now that the HTML editor is a pain. In fact this is true of most HTML editors that are implemented in Javascript for use within a browser. I've had to deal with this issue many times and, sorry to say, I've learned to side-step it rather than dealing with it head-on.

  Let me also say that I produce e-commerce and corporate intranet solutions and I also write software - so I know what a pain the code for these editors can be.

  Please just add a check-box in the User Profile / Settings page to turn off the editor for those who are happy to type HTML. Side-stepping this issue may not be the best solution but you don't need full HTML on your site - just the basics like <p> and a few others. You'd be surprised how many people have already learned these basic tags.

  (Sorry if this feature already exists and I haven't found it yet.)

• Due to the above problem, I edited some recent material. Several times. For some reason I decided to check my messages and, guess what? It seems that I sent several hundred messages today because I edited the same article over and over again in an effort to fix the HTML problems (which I had thankfully stopped trying to do because I felt like I was losing the battle.)

  The problem here is that the updates trigger an email process. I suggest that the email process should start first by checking the date/time of the last update. If it was, say, 15 minutes ago or less - skip the email *please* as it's not necessary.

  Some people will say that 15 minutes is too long. To this I would reply that the Tracker feature seems to be a good way to keep track of what's new on a per-account basis - why not rely on that instead of the emails?

• Since I'm here: Please add a draft folder or a flag for for published content vs. in progress. It would be great if there was a check-box associated with each article causing it to appear in NowPublic.com. If the person editing the article un-checks the flag - the article should go into Draft mode. Then I can find photos and correct typos slowly without generating any emails or getting page views from people who end-up seeing the unfinished copy of my work.
• I note that the Math Question is less frustrating than a captcha but also rather pointless (it's trivial to write code that will add, in this case, 9+7.) You might want to try what they do on Linked-In instead: the users are asked to type their passwords when they do something relevant. This works out okay as the browser will, in many cases, provide the password. The user just clicks on the submit button to get past that screen.

I hope this helps,

Thanks,

Sam.

How come only 21 of our favorites show up on our profile page? How can we see all our favorites?

1.Newsvine has a non-discriminatory income sharing and distribution policy to ALL contributors.

NowPublic does not.

Any plans for reciprocation of benefits?

2.The assonance of 'Crowd Powered' no doubt appeals to some.

However,in life in general, who in their right mind trusts the judgement of a crowd ?

A layout like this:

http://members.nowpublic.com/user/15931/assignments

is simple and readily accessible by anyone and prioritises the STORIES and their chronology and stats clearly and gives a reader a straightforward story browsing option.

This layout

http://members.nowpublic.com/cornwallnews

appears cluttered and contains backroom material such as forum exchanges which are not, to the wider world, NEWS. Shouldn't NowPublic members  be able to choose how much of that NotNewsRelated clutter they want around their stories? How about giving NowPublic members tick-box controls to choose which of those features/panels they want to appear on their primary story collection/index page?

CN prefer the first layout as a primary home/story list page.

PS 1  Story Videos working much better  with IE7 e.g.: This CN World Exclusive

PS 2  How's the revenue sharing  strategy shaping up?

1.How did Seedplanter and Politisite's comments get out of chronological sequence?

2.When will a reply to CN's comments be forthcoming?

How reliable are the stats on personal member pages? Page Views in particular. They don't seem to match the views stats on each article.

What does "Block this user" do?

What does "Block this user" do?

Still don't know what "Block This User" does. And it would be nice to know or have a link to a list of our Front Page Stories. Our own or others from our personal pages.

Block this user is if you're getting private messages from someone that's annoying. Honestly I find it doesn't get a ton of use, I only noticed it the other day.

Still trying to figure out how in the system to properly attribute photos. There should really be a field attached to the photo, regardless of what story it's attached to, to give "credit line" info. I've uploaded several photos, but have no idea how to properly attribute them in the story, as they're all displayed along the left hand side listing they're "by mgmirkin." But they're not my photos, they're photos Keck, NASA et al have allowed use of providing they get a proper image credit (which I'd prefer to give them, since the images are pretty good and deserve mention).

For me, this seems like a high priority. I'd think it would be for you guys too, since it's a way of trying to ensure that photos are properly attributed and nobody gets sued over copyright issues. It wouldn't hurt to be able to differentiate "mine" vs "someone else's" and "if mine, here's what license I want it distributed under" or "if someone else's, here's the license they allow its use under."

Cheers,

~Michael