Theme of the week in OD

Now, you may or may not have noticed that there is a new theme of the week, that being suggestions for how to improve OD. The DM also wrote an entry in his diary encouraging people to submit entries.

Now, some people got mightly offended by this and said that the DM should just check back through his notes and find out what people suggested. Let’s just think about this for a second. Quick question for you all: how many of you can be bothered to go back and check notes that you were left last week? Last month? Last year?

Now consider the fact that the DM gets way, way more notes per entry than any other diarist. Are people starting to realise the problem here? Can anyone not see that, rather than doing that, he may actually want the suggestions in one place, not dotted randomly amongst other things that have been said to him?

I do have some suggestions for this site. In a rather unconventional way. I’m going to write about them here then post this entry in Theme of the Week. Hey, it’s almost like that was what we were asked to do!

So, without further ado, my suggestions:

1) Blocking for all This is a very popular suggestion and for good reason. It’s ridiculous that, just because I can’t afford a OD+ subscription I can’t block anyone that is harassing me without having to send an email.

2) More admin The admin staff here do a fantastic job. Absolutely fantastic. But, it’s becoming more and more obvious that three are not enough. I’m not suggesting myself, I have absolutely zero coding skills, but I’m sure that there would be volunteers. The number of admin staff, IMHO, needs to be at least doubled.

3) Increased note length I don;t think they should be scrapped altogether cos I don’t want to try and read novel sized notes on my entries, but they do need, subscriber or not, to be at least doubled.

4) Update mobile site It’s an absolute nightmare to use at the moment and I never noticed that more than when my phone was my only internet connection for a while. While an Android app would be cool, just cleaning up the mobile site would be a huge help.

5) Preview button This one is last and that’s because it’s something I’ve been calling for for years now. There is absolutely, positively, no excuse for not having a preview button when writing an entry. The suggestion to post as a private entry, check it then post it as public causes problems with posting to circles and is incompatable with the anti-spam measures. Clicking preview, then clicking post to post or edit to make changes is not more problematic than the private entry suggestion.

So, those are my humble suggestions.

Will