Gather Grumblings, or: What I Would Do to Improve my Favorite Online Obsession

Gather Grumblings, or: What I Would Do to Improve my Favorite Online Obsession


Like many of you, I have developed something of an addiction for this website.  I visit every day, check points (trying in vain to figure out the matrix), make connections, post articles, and wonder why some pieces attract comments while others don’t.  Overall, I’m amazed by what’s been built here.  But also like many of you I can see places where it could use some improvement, so if I could wave my magic wand over Gather.com, here’s what I would fix:

•    My groups could be categorized.  It would be much easier to publish if I could sort and categorize the groups I belong to, facilitating the choices when I publish a piece.  As it is now, I have to wade through three long columns looking for the ones that are appropriate, interspersed with the ones that aren’t.  It wastes time and is frustrating.
•    Seeing my connections.  I’d like to be able to see if I am connected to someone everywhere I see their name, rather than having to visit their homepage to see how closely we are connected.  It just would save clicks and time.
•    Sorting and cataloging my material.  I write a lot, for many different publications including my own.  Some of it I also publish to Gather.com.  It would be great if I could access a catalog of the titles of what I’ve published, in index or table-of-contents form, sortable by date, title, group, etc.  Not the thing we have now, where I click on “My Content” and get only the most recent, then have to click again to get the list (on 7 pages!) and then can only sort by most recent, most commented, etc.  I want a quick way to find what I’ve written, both to make sure I don’t duplicate posts, and to make it easier to refer another reader to something I’ve posted in the past.
•    Bugs.  The two most annoying bugs I’ve seen here lately are:
1)    When I cut & paste an article into the publishing window, and then upload a photo, it erases most of the document and I have to re-paste it.
2)    On one of my groups, the sidebar listing posts awaiting my approval says, “2” when there are none, “3” when there is one, and so on.  Easy to work around, sure, but probably indicative of a larger flaw somewhere in the code.

•    The inability to report or regulate comments.  When I post a piece, if someone posts a comment that is rude, abusive, off topic, or even obscene, there is essentially nothing I can do about it except remove the entire post.  Some have even found ways (though HTML I am supposing) to post photos in comments.  That could be good if it could be regulated, but as soon as the pornographers find out they can spam Gather with linked photos, they’re gonna be crawling all over the place.  And I’d at least like to be able to report a comment in a manner similar to “flagging” an article.  Just some way to draw admin attention if I can’t just delete the comments from my articles myself.
•    There’d be a spellchecker.  A least for the articles, and preferably for the comments as well.  It can be pretty annoying to read poorly written articles. 
•    Email notification.  Most of this works well, but I’d still like to get a notification when someone else responds to an article I have commented on.

Well, that’s about it, for now anyway.  Here endeth the rant.  Thanks for listening.

Peace,
kmf