John, I like your suggestions.
In one instance, you are actually talking about restoring a feature that Classic SI already has, and that the New SI has unaccountably jettisoned. That feature is marked in bold in the following passage from your post:
How about adding features to PeopleMarks to make it act just like SubjectMarks? In SM you can go back all the way to the beginning of a thread, why not within PM? In SM you can search within subject, why not within a person? In SM you can jump from one subject message to the next message within that subject. Why not do the same within PM and jump from one message by a person to the next message by that person?
(I don't quite get your last point, incidentally.)
Didn't you ever use the "posts by this person" search function on Classic SI? You go to the person's profile, click the "posts by this person" button on the search box, and enter a keyword. Then hit "Search," and it will find all the posts by that person in which the keyword appears -- going back 120 days. We asked to have that function restored on the Beta version, and we were promised it would be. But to date it has not been.
What I would like to see is not only the restoration of that function (which is exactly analogous to the "search this thread" function on SM that was restored), but also a search capability going back further than 120 days. Frankly, I'd like to see it go all the way back to the beginning -- of the thread or of the individual poster's posts.
THAT is the kind of improvement that would really means something, not a frilly extra we could live quite comfortably without.
Now, about the checkboxes.
I would really like a checkbox, which my Eudora e-mail is equipped with, and which I use to "grade" the Listserve materials I archive. I have quite a few years of backfiled materials. So the checkbox makes it easy for me to find the really important stuff when I need to. HOWEVER....personally, I would rather check off what I think is important. I do not necessarily agree with other people's ratings. Besides, sometimes a great post is posted at a bad time of day, or on an off day, and so doesn't get flagged. Sometimes it is over the other posters' heads. And so forth. The system you describe sounds a little too mechanical to me. The highest number of hits does not necessarily equal the highest value. As a matter of fact, insulting & nasty posts get hit a lot. Would that make them of High Value? :-))
But for simple flagging capacity (for myself) I vote with both hands. It would make it much easier to go back over a thread and find what I thought were the best posts on a subject -- and find them quickly.
jbe |
