I have received and continue to receive many great suggestions from Gather members on how Gather can become an even better site. I feel it is a good idea to start listing some of these suggestions I have had from various members. I hope to make this a regular series containing ideas, suggestions and insight from members that Gather may be interested in eventually taking onboard. I will post this article to the Building a Better Gather Group, so that Team Gather is also able to evaluate the suggestions.
Below are brief profiles of the members who came up with the suggestions. I have also copied and pasted the suggestions in their words. In some cases, I have only copied part of a comment made to me as only a part relates to the suggestions:
David S has joined Gather in January 2008. According to his profile David is weird, creative, intuitive, domineering, submissive, artistic, unique, avant-garde, spurious, incisive. He is into Jazz, Scientific Fiction, writing, watching documentaries and much more.
David's suggestion is about compiling comments. Here is what he told me:
I have a site suggestion: it would be fantastic to have a link created on our profile page that takes us to all comments received in reverse order (latest ones first), with the citation of what's being commented on. Currently, we either have to browse through all of our stuff, or get an endless supply of emails--both are just way too cumbersome. Several other sites to which I belong do this with great success.
Joel Samuel has been a Gather member since February 2006. According to his profile, Joel is Honest- amicable- humorous- intelligent- communcative-sensual- outgoing- real- spiritual and some even say sexy! I believe he really loves dogs as well and the one on his icon is an adorable one!
Joel's suggestion is about having an audience tracking system in place. Here's what Joel says:
When will Gather provide an audience tracking system so that people know how many people come to view their material.
Even Youtube has this tool so why hasn't Gather implemented it so people can see how many people come to check out their contributions.
JAC D Has been a Gather member since November 2006. According to her profile she is Honest, Sincere, Warm, Friendly, A good listener, Fun, Quiet, Dedicated, Persisitant, Loving, Giving. Family oriented, helpful, Faithful. Creative, Colorful. Jac is happily married for 37 years! (wow!). She is into Yanni and Elvis Priestly amongst lots of other things.
Jac's suggestion is about having a folder system in our Gather mails for easy sorting & easier browsing. Here's what Jac says:
I wish they would give us folders for our email keepsakes. This is a huge frusteration since I joined Gather over a year ago that some emails I don't want to delete but there is no folder to save them in. Also I hate having to start back to page 1 when going through people and or groups. If I want to delete them I have to start all over with page one again when I am on page 11 this is frusterating.
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If you have a suggestion for building a better Gather you are welcome to send me an email message or leave a comment here. I will post a selection of the suggestions on the next Building a Better Gather update.
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Comments: 49
Aesop for Today, February 1
1) There should be a way for an image to be posted in an article AND under "my images" without having to upload it twice. Maybe when posting the image for an article there could be a place to "check" if you want it under your images too. Also, if I have posted an image, I would like to have the option to use it in future articles without having to upload it again.
2) If I block someone from sending me email, I would like the option to block that person from rating and commenting on my articles AND pinging me too. Luckily, I only have one person in that category....but it is time consuming to delete his comments or remove his "pings".
I wish there was a way that we could delete SEVERAL articles or images at the same time instead of one by one!
In addition to Jac's suggestion, having a set of links for pages 1, 2, 3, and so on instead of having to go through "next" interminable times to get to them all would help.
Erica's idea, enabling us to post to a "set" of groups with one click each time is a great one.
Bridget's idea for batch editing/deletion is another one I like.
I sent these suggestions to info@gather.com but never got a response:
1. Ability to rearrange the order of articles in a group... (top ten featured articles, for example, but put each one in the numerical position you want it ranked...)
2. Albums for the photos instead of endless pages... that would be keen.
3. Niftier yet: An archive directory based on a little calendar or something...
4. I just won a new cell phone (on gather!). It takes video clips, which I'm ecstatic about - but I can not send them to gather because they're the wrong format. Youtube has a feature whereby I can send them there directly from my cellphone. Do you think gather will ever incorporate such a feature?
Thank you very much for taking the time to send us your many suggestions! Every week, I post new member suggestions and feedback to our private company group, so that every employee of Gather can see them and consider them. Studying the feedback of our members is one of the most important steps when planning for future Gather.com upgrades. Thanks again!
Now, creating photo albums for organizing our images would be awesome!
Elsie & Ellen I am with you regarding being able to format fonts and copy paste formatting. I am finding it a bit difficult without these features as well. The latest I have heard from Gather Support is that they are working on resolving these at the moment. The Gather Team does not work over the weekends, so I hope to hear from them on Monday again.
Lydia Thanks so much for letting us know about the ideas you sent to info@gather.com and about Chuck's response. Really informative!
I will try to publish this series at least twice a week and showcase some of the best ideas received from all of you. So please keep leaving comments to this thread!
I know we have subscriptions but all our groups are also sent their.. maybe a folder for people and one for groups!
other sites have this feature in place and i have been told it is simple to add....when you reply on own content page to another member,they receive alert...click on your name within mail alert which leaves comment on your content .....it is a nice flow rather than leaving owner of page hanging wishin' and a hopin' for a reply....
many of the other suggestions above would be great,but only if implemented...
my question to you,Luna, is what makes this latest list any different than the many posted over the last year and i suspect even during previous years?....i have been here just over a year and have not seen suggestions same as above applied...
cheers,gayle
As for your question, the reason I have started this list is because I see a lot of great suggestions around gather. However, there are thousands of members on Gather and these suggestions are scattered all over the place. I also appreciate the fact that Gather is still a very small organisation compared to many other online sites such as Youtube, Facebook etc, so the site simply does not have (or can afford to have ) enough staff to go through each and every post by members to find suggestions for improvement.
I figured if I could start compiling some of these suggestions and keep producing some lists which they could work with, it would make their life easier and our voices will be heard much faster. Posting these links help in a few ways
1. I will be providing a brief profile of the people who made the suggestions in the first place. This I think is a way to feature interesting, helpful and creative individuals and draw attention to their namespace.
2. I will be posting the lists on a regular basis, so hopefully in time, the series will be well known and more people will find out that something like this exists and add their suggestions to the list and this can become a source of great ideas
3. The list will be presented in a more organised way, which means going through the suggestions will be a lot less time consuming for Gather Staff and members.
Of course if you prefer you can make your own list and send it to Gather as well, I am another Gather member just like you and only trying to do my bit to help.
I hope my explanation answers your question.
nothing wrong with making your own list here and hope you didn't think i was inferring such...it is just frustrating to keep repeating the same suggestions and not see any action....cheers,gayle
And I still believe Gather should be working harder so that internationals can benefit from Gather points, other sites seem to be able to at least let their Canadian contributors benefit, what is the hang up?
Blessings
And in the mail section, it would be great to have the drop down menu on top as well as the bottom so that we don't have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to mark as read (or whatever).
Thanks, by the way, for listening to the members and for soliciting suggestions.
Maya excellent idea! I would like to see that too and also make formatting fonts easier. May be we could have an icon for selecting font colour and type etc!
1. We now get alerts by email whenever somebody comments on our articles. In the same way I would like to get alerts whenever somebody comments on our comments or replies to our comments because at present when we comment at length on somebody's great article we have to go back to the same article again out of curiosity to see if there are any counter comments only to draw a blank often resulting in a waste of time. Further, we sometimes don't remember which article we commented on. Therefore an alert would be a great help.
2. Whenever we are drafting an article I wish there is an automatic saving every minute feature.
Thank you.
Regarding getting notified when somebody else makes a comment, there is a round about way of getting this at the moment. If you subscribe to a person and set your profile so that you will be notified whenever they make a comment, those notifications will be delivered to your inbox as well. Only problem with that is, you will be notified everytime your subscription makes a comment.
I will forward all these suggestions to Gather and let's see what comes out of it!
I would love to have the capacity to create my own folders for my groups and people.
The suggestions about folders for the publishing process is excellent also.
Thanks for doing this Luna.
Have a wonderful day!