Gatherology: Glitches, delays, and other misfortunes

I'm prone to ranting about things that bother me, as you've probably noticed from time to time. Today, one of the things that's been bothering me is Gather itself. Like anyone, there are some things that I see as problems, and some improvements I'd like to see made. I know that attempting to fix these things while the site is running is probably problematic (especially if thousands of people are accessing the page that needs to be altered), and therefore I don't actually expect that a single rant is going to change things. That nonwithstanding, here's some things I wish would change.

Although usually my computer gets along well with Gather, lately (within the last month or so), I've noticed a couple of significant problems:

1) When attempting to publish an article, it sometimes takes a very long time to go from the Publish screen to the Article Options screen, or from the Article Options screen to actually publishing the article. Although I can't entirely be certain that it isn't just my connection, it seems to do this on other computers I've tried to access Gather from.

2) The Article Options section has a definite impact on slower machines; I've found this out the hard way when attempting to connect using a classroom computer with low memory. My guess would be that the list system they're currently using is hard on the computer, particularly if you have several hundred groups in there, as it takes several seconds for a selection on this computer to be acknowledged and added to the 'groups to post to' list.

3) This is actually an old problem, but if I'm going to be complaining I might as well do it properly and mention this one: the submission timeout problem. Essentially, this occurs most frequently when you are trying to publish to many, many groups (and thus taking time to select all of them) -- you attempt to publish, only to be returned to the 'Publish Article' screen where a completely blank article awaits you, and you have to hit the Back button to return to the article you had, then click Continue and resubmit your article to groups. Sometimes it just takes a long time to submit to the groups I want to submit to (especially if I'm suffering a performance decline from a slow machine), and sometimes I get distracted by a shiny object. Either way, it's annoying to spend several minutes struggling with the group publishing options only to discover that it was a completely wasted effort.

4) The WYSIWYG editor. It does a good job most of the time, but occasionally it garbles things up badly, especially if you copy/paste things into it from other articles. If you have a list of links near each other, they occasionally cross-contaminate and become one massive link. If you paste in an image from another article, chances are it'll require HTML editing to display property. You can't bold links using normal methods. And so on. 

There's also a few things I'd like to see added or changed, even though they aren't technically 'problems':

1) Titles on pictures. We have them on articles and videos, so why not pictures? It'd make things a little less maddening when I'm trying to link people to an image in the group gallery.

2) Being able to see picture info (like number of comments and such) and being able to view the picture and its comments from within the content settings section.

3) Being able to remove multiple articles, pictures, or videos simultaneously. If you've ever managed a group without moderated posting and come home to discover ten articles that don't belong there and need to be removed, you've probably thought this would be nice to have, too.

4) Being able to change the default number of articles, images, or videos displayed per page. I know that technically, you can get around it by directly manipulating the URL - but it would be nice to be able to input your desired per-page count so that by default, for example, one page shows one hundred entries.

5) Saved group-select options. I'd like to be able to designate, for example, a post-anywhere 'profile' that automatically posts an article to the groups that don't have topic requirements, or profiles to post my favorite titled articles (like Common Cents) to the groups that'll accept them without having to struggle with the article options screen quite so much.

6) Make the 'to groups' section collapsible, so that if you want to see which groups it's been posted to, you have to click on something -- or better, make it so that you can opt to do this through the account settings area (so that those who want to see the groups all the time can, and those who don't can opt to hide them until they do).

7) Filtered Viewing. We currently have guarded viewing -- where you can opt not to view certain types of content by default -- so why not add a function where you can input tags that you don't want to see? (And by 'not see', I mean they won't appear in the article listing of groups you are in, in the 'articles for me' section, etc. at all.)

8) Moderator Mode. I don't use guarded viewing, but I imagine that if I did, I'd still want to ensure that my groups aren't getting hit with porn ads or something. Therefore, the moderator mode -- a mode designed for use by group owners to view articles even if their normal settings prevent this. (Perhaps you could use this to remove multiple articles, or combine it with the 'view all articles in this group with this tag' option to hunt down and remove articles with a tag that obviously doesn't fit.)

I'm pretty sure a few of those, at least, are impractical or would put a heavy load on the servers, but they're all nice to think about, no?