Poll: New Rubberslug is live! What's next?

Now that the new site is live, what areas would you like to see improvement in next? This isn't necessarily going to decide what actually happens... but I figured that it's good to take the pulse of the community to see what you want. :)

#1: Timely technical support. There seems a long gap between the time an issue is flagged and any response on the other end, and an even longer before it is resolved. Without this, it's unlikely that the RS community will grow quickly.

#2: Making "Manage Exhibits" more user friendly. The teensy boxes for comments have been noted by several people. And having to edit site text without having the current text available for viewing makes upgrading site pages a nightmare.

Many of us have learned simple methods of enhancing comments, by importing graphic elements and using html markup to enhance text. It would be a major plus if a toolkit were added to the "Manage Exhibits" page, again along the lines of the one provided by Anime-Beta.

#3: Making searches within RS easier and quicker. I rely on searches to help me put my new items in context, so having this no longer functional is a problem.

In future this would be made more efficient if we could add tags to our exhibit pages, much as Photobucket allows me to do with images I store there. That would allow for searches that do not rely on having a given word appear in the text of the title or the description.

#4: Making the forum more user-friendly, with capabilities similar to Anime-Beta for adding enhancements (bold facing, italics, underlining, size, color, etc.) as well as importing graphics. Fixing issues of long standing, such as the way the thread resets to the FIRST page when one submits a reply, rather than to the LAST page where the reply actually appears.

Overall, eliminating the last of the retro 1980s white-letters-on-black (or -on-gray) format that many people have found annoying.

I think the RS community is on your side and grateful for the work that you have put in to this project, for no reward in advance. But I sense an overall feeling that the changes have been cosmetic rather than substantive, and that the practical disadvantages of the change are more common than initially appeared.

I would love to see some of the simple things taken care of first. (At least, I think they might be simple. D'oh!) I want the ability to delete a gallery listing and have it gone. Right now, I see it in my trash but with no way to empty my trash. I'm not someone who lives in the past. If I sell a cel, I purge all that information both online and offline once I know my transaction is completed.

Also, I want to delete marketplace listings. I noticed there were a couple of cels in my marketplace that I no longer owned. I marked them as unavailable but I wasn't sure if that meant they were deleted. I did notice that other older listings were gone such as sold items and ones I unlisted myself prior to the upgrade.

Overall, the new RS version is awesome! ^_^

I'd like to see the hit count back on the owner's home page...whatever you call it... the gallery owner comes in from one side, and can see all the gallery info and such? I think I'm masochistic. I like to peek in every now and then and see if anyone is looking at the gallery (not the individual pieces). The guilt of seeing more hits makes me feel the pressure to find the scanner and get busy. :) Or break down and take pictures.

I would like to see more control over our galleries: customizing the order of our features/series, more options for different design templates. Overall, providing some more options so the design of each gallery can be more unique. It would also be cool to have a built in rating option for our cels, i.e. I've given this cel 5 stars because it was a wishlist cel.

It would also be cool if RS was a little more like a social networking site for communicating with other RS members. We could have a friends list or a list of our favorite galleries that we could organize. We could even have a list of our favorite series/cel from other members - the ones we like to pop in and oogle from time to time - almost like a "favorites" list. I think this would bring more traffic to everyone's galleries. People will start looking at everyone's favorite lists and find more and more artwork that they like. Etsy.com has a cool favorites option right now and that is what gave me this idea.

Messaging should be easy between members (I think the RS gallery feedback has not been working for awhile). In addition to being able to send private messages, each gallery owner could have a "wall" where others could leave feedback about their gallery and where they could control that content (make it visible or not). Like Facebook.

It would also be cool to have a place where we could customize a public profile - tell more about ourselves. It could have questions like "What got you started collecting?" and "What is the focus of your gallery?" Right now that option is attached to our gallery but not many people really utilize it. Again, I am thinking along the lines of the info page on Facebook but more related to our collecting.

So overall I would like to see:
1) More customization in galleries (with a rating system option)

2) A friends list or favorites gallery / favorite cels list

3) Better messaging between RS members with a "Wall" for each gallery to leave comments/feedback.

4) A public profile page for each RS member.

Overall I just want to see Rubberslug start to become more about the community of collectors and not just the collections themselves. I don't want it to turn into Facebook, but it would be nice to have more features that make it easier to get to know our fellow collectors. Right now I feel like there are a lot of galleries with no face or personality attached to it. Members could choose how "active" they want to be in our community. If they just want to put up a gallery and not participate in any of the other features that is OK too.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the new Rubberslug and I am so appreciative of what you have done, Jason. But when you asked what we want to see improved, this is what came to mind.