I'm back! 10 days on the road without wtm and computer was fun :)
I dug through an interesting book about social web applications and I'd like to ask you 2 questions:
> What’s the #1 feature you think we should be working on (this can also be a set of features) Can be an existing feature (e.g. improve the quiz part) or a completely new one (e.g. groups)
> Which feature do you like least (or use least) and think we could easily drop it.
> What’s the #1 feature you think we should be working on (this can also be a set of features) Groups and indeed improve the tag-system (I'd love to see the possibility to search for several tags as well as showing first the exact tag-matches ('car') and after that the partly matches ('scar', 'cartoon', 'scarf' etc))
> Which feature do you like least (or use least) and think we could easily drop it. I don't use the DVD-shelf and the Discover-movies-page, but I see no reason to drop those :p
I don't know it is a good idea, but I personally would like beside "spoiler shout" also a "spoiler tag" where you can put a name of actor or something which give a hint to solve shot. This tag could be seen after solving snapshot or for shots in archive, just like spoiler shouts. That way shots which you can't tag without giving hint for those who didn't solve it yet (e.g. Johnny Depp headshots) would be easier to find.
"I don't know it is a good idea, but I personally would like beside "spoiler shout" also a "spoiler tag" where you can put a name of actor or something which give a hint to solve shot. This tag could be seen after solving snapshot or for shots in archive, just like spoiler shouts. That way shots which you can't tag without giving hint for those who didn't solve it yet (e.g. Johnny Depp headshots) would be easier to find."
I like this idea. :)
I'd also like to see the "movies I've watched" imported from wtm1. It currently still says "The list of your watched movies will shortly be transferred over to your Shelf".
I like the tag idea as well. Also, I think it would be neat to improve the search system. If we could get a "related search" feature that would be great, similar to what Google and other search engines do... For example, if you look up "Boy in Pajamas" you get no results but with this kind of feature, other movies that include these words in their titles could come up (like "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas").
Edit: Oh, and how about some sort of function to see who, if anyone, have favourited your shots? Not particularly useful, but I'm always curious about that.
I still look forward to the groups-thingie, and maybe also a censored WTM version, where you can only see non-gore/sex-shots? People would have to give shots a rating when uploading for that though, but just keep to the DVD-rating, I guess. Also, I would like to see more leaderboards in the hall of fame. Also for most first solves, most title shot uploads (that way you stimulate people to upload more of those too), highest acceptance rating perhaps?
Agree with Ohlookbirdies.. about the favourited shots! Also curious about that, because maybe we can use this in the future when we have the group-thing going on... when you have a set of people who like typical shots from a person.. And more leaderboards too, love those!
I don't vote inside the New Submissions anymore because it takes time and it doesn't trigger new features in the game. Beyond being a Property Master, you don't have a goal. You just get WTM bucks and you don't know what to do with that huge amount of money! Here is 2 ideas:
1. The "TAKE MY MONEY AND RUN" button. You can buy Awesome Uploads with your WTM bucks. This would be a very cool and rewarding feature. Like, say, 5 uploads would cost 10 000 bucks.
2. The "BRIBE" button. You can buy a certain amount of clues per month to the uploaders (10 max). It would be cool because sometimes I like a snap, I'm curious to know what is the movie and I don't feel like waiting a month to get it.
Just for the brainstorming: I have another idea. With your cherish WTM bucks you can also have the "SPECIAL RECOMMANDATION" or "REVIEW OF THE DAY" or, better, the "STOP THE PRESS" button.
You buy a space on the home page, let's say 300 bucks recommanding (or destroying) a movie who just hits the theaters. You just have to put the poster snaphot of the movie and a 5 sentences short text.
Then the players can thumbs up or thumbs down your review.
This mean you can earn back your investment or not. If 50 people thumbs you up at 10 bucks, you get 200 bucks bonus. We can even have a Review Hall of Fame with the best earnings…
I feel creative, so I just toss a few more ideas. They're free!
You can also have the "I'LL BE BACK" button. Let's say you have what you consider a great snapshot who didn't make it through the New Submissions vortex.
You're frustated. Hold on! Now you have the opportunity to spend 300 WTM bucks to push it through instantly back to the new submissions for 24 hours. This snap would be marked 'I'll be back snapshot" for players to understand you really care about this one and they should give more attention while voting again.
Don't throw tomatoes at me but I have another idea (I'm having a fine Partagas cigare with a drink of old rhum, here. So my mind is reeling!).
It is called "THE FIGHT CLUB ZONE". It is very exclusive. You have to be a supporter and at least a Set Decorator.
This area regroups all rejected snapshots rated 7.00 and up from last month. Snaps below 7.00 don't enter. There is a private Hall of Fame for top solvers and a Hall of Fame for top rated uploaders. Top 10 solvers get WTM bucks and top 10 uploaders get 1 point each for their Upload Score.
The "FIGHT CLUB ZONE" is reset every end of the month.
The idea is to give a second chance to the rejected snapshots because frankly dear I do give a damn when I see a beautiful snap who goes down the drain.
I really like your ideas Palahniuk007, you are in a very creative mood indeed ha ha :) but I'd say make it snapshot rated 6 and up for your The Fight club zone. Looking at the new submission, it is back where we were months ago almost, a 8 seems to be a 7 something today :(
Ahahahah! Thank you beautiful Chrisy! Here is another one, because it's morning and I had a strong coffee.
Ready? The "SUBTITLES BUTTON". Could be a funny feature. You have to be a supporter and a Property Master, more or less.
It would only work when a snapshot make it to the Feature Films Contest. ONLY ONE subtitle is authorized and visible for players who solved the snap. The uploader cannot sub his snap: only the fastest player who solved it.
The sub can be anything: a funny line who fits the snap, an onomatopoeia, a quote from the movie, a song if it's a musical… And here is the good news: the player who enters the subtitle is actually paid! He gets a 100 bucks.
The sub is limited to a sentence of 20 words max and appears under the tags. You can even have a nice item on your shelf when you wrote 20 or 50 subs.
Asmodai had a great idea with the censored WTM and it gives me a vision!
The "X-RATED" snap. You can see it only if you're a Cinematographer. Other players will have an elegant gold X on a silver screen. That's it!
No porn is allowed of course unless it's a classic one like "Behind the Green Door" or "Deep Throat". Still you have plenty of choices from "Emmanuelle" to "Boogie Nights".
The "X-RATED" snap should be rare and limited to 5 per month. It should also be a privilege for the uploader (also a Cinematographer) who got through the New Submission vortex: he gets 2 points for his shot.
I'm having coffee and cigarettes, it's saturday morning, so I go on!
When you become a Studio Boss, you should have power. You should be Zeus and have a red button, with a white lightning strike designed on it.
This button is a must have. It is called the… "TERMINATOR" button. Or "THE FORCE" button. It appears in the New Submission next to the 4 action buttons (heart, bookmark, deletion, solution).
When you decide a snapshot doesn't respect the rules, you simply delete it without passing through the deletion vote system. Cause you're the Boss, right? Nobody is gonna argue with you.
As the Boss, you can also delete your own New Submission snapshot! Because after a few hours, if you see that your shot is getting low ratings, it's better to delete it without waiting 48 hours and upload a brand new one.
It will also be good for other players to have a friend who's a Studio Boss. They can ask the Boss to delete one of their New Submission shot, or better, to pay him 50 bucks through a "BRIBE" button.
This censure thingy worries me. You should make sure that there is a good control of what is done so that it doesn't get exagerated. Not everybody get offended by the same type of shots and it seems some people get offended by very little. For instance, a few weeks ago someone felt very offended by a shot from "La guerre des boutons". Now the French sure will laugh ha ha ha. Yes this person thought the shot was porn just because there were kids running naked in the woods lol
Edit: and I just often see the site as a good way to educate people and open their mind on the fact that nudity and horror can be beautiful, I just think it is a shame if these shots get filtered. After all, the site is supposed to be for over 18.
I don't know if anybody read this but who cares! When ideas come up you better get them out of your chest.
When you become a Studio Boss, you should have a great reward.
It is a platinum card named "THE PLAYER".
This card allows you to start a Vault Contest on any topics you want, limited to 40 snapshots uploaded by you or chosen in the Archives. You are allowed to start one Contest per year as long as you stay a Studio Boss and you didn't spend your bucks on Awesome Uploads (see previous ideas).
Now I don't know how this work technically but to me there is not enough Vault Contests.
In case the Studio Boss doesn't want to start a Vault Contest, he can launch a discussion in the forum called: "PLATINUM PLAYER CARD FOR SALE". He can then negociate a price with other players to get the privilege to start a Vault Contest. There is no limit for the price, but the lowest amount authorized by WTM should be 30 000 or maybe 50 000 bucks. The winner pays the Boss through a "BRIBE" button.
That's why all players should have the beloved "HERE'S JOHNNY!" button (in memory of Shining).
It is a filter that you activate to not see the "X-RATED" snapshots. Damn! They will not even see the beautiful golden X on the silver screen background if they are Cable Monkeys!
Then it will not be a problem for you to upload the snapshot you love from Aviator showing little Howard naked in front of his mother…
Hey thanks a lot OhLookBirdies!!!! Who cares! I'm not making this great site.
But Naut asked some ideas to improve stuff here. And the reality is: you sit on a pile of WTM bucks like Scrooge McDuck and you can't toss the money by the windows.
It's simple. When you favourite a snap you give 10 bucks to the uploader. You actually buy the snap and the uploader gets petty cash for his effort.
But the good news is this: when your uploaded snapshot is favourited at least 10 times you win the incredible "LOVE STORY" award! You enter the "LOVE STORY" Hall of Fame of the month and (are you ready for this?) you win ONE AWESOME UPLOAD!
You have a rich fantasy my dear palahniuk :P I am not sure whether it's a good idea to give people the power to delete without question but I am up for more contests. Maybe those contest organised by players could form some sort of sandbox mode. No trophy's or anything, just the hall's of fame and the pride of having your name in it.
To make sure these contests are of good quality it would be a good idea to put up some restrictions regarding who can start a contest and at what frequency, plus a standard format as in: a set number of shots per contest and a set amount of days to upload and solve.
for the rest it's just plain and simple: more solving fun! And taking the shots from the archive (and thereby hiding their solutions again) would enable the fabolous shots that are collecting dust and being forgotten in our archives to shine once again!
That's why we should also have the "SNAPSHOTS OF THE MONTH" memorabilia.
It's easy. All Snapshots of the Day from last month are packed together with a special Hall of Fame. Top 10 uploaders get one Awesome Upload each and top 10 solvers get 300 bucks each.
And each 25th of december, we will have the "SNAPSHOTS OF THE YEAR" with the 10 best snaps from each month!
One more thing: half the time I forget to click the Amazon button when I buy something there. To keep this site running and for you guys and gals to make some petty cash you should motivate players to remember it.
How?
Simple. You have a box on your profile that you name for instance "GOLD RUSH". The Amazon button is there to link you out.
This box shows you how many WTM bucks you earned while shopping on Amazon. Each confirmed purchase you make gets you 300 bucks whether you bought a DVD or an iPod.
@naut: I was quite excited about the wishlist feature but at the moment it doesnt seem to do anything, and not many people know about it.
Would love to add films to my wishlist, go to a wishlist page, select the movies in my list I want to buy, and click a button to add them to an amazon.co.uk basket. Would be easy for us the users, and would guarantee referrals from amazon. I am constantly forgetting to use the amazon referral link here. It has the potential to be my personal favourite feature :)
Best thing you ever did in my opinion was to create /home. The only reason I check my profile now is to get links to my last films to make it to FF. Reversing the list of the "your current FF shots" widget on /home to show the latest first, would be a simple but very useful change. oh and on /home, I think the two sections should be swapped, so that the grey "latest forum activity" section would be at the bottom, and the yellow "latest reviews, SotD" etc.. section should be in the middle.
Worst feature, and I really hate to say this after you and tliff put so much work into it, is the stats... sorry! It has the potential to be very good, but I dont find the stats you have chosen to be that interesting to me. I mean, basically they show graphs for things I can already find out with the HoF etc. Would love to see things like average solve rate of your shots, average difficulty of your shots etc..
Also, I love the movie recommendations page, I have already ordered one film from it. But would be interested in this being expanded or showcased a little more, specifically to actually be updated weekly ;) Would be nice if we could have a section on our profile for our own recommendations of rare gem or classic movie (or multiple - the requirement being you must add a review), and weekly a random one was chosen. Perhaps with a memorabilia or bucks reward attached for a chosen recommendation to encourage people to do it. I guess you could scrape the amount of votes from imdb to guage if the film is rare or classic. Would be nice to automate it in some way because at the moment it isnt exactly weekly ;)
Also the movie recomendation page does seem to be seperate from the rest of the site, I like it but I have to remember to click on it every now and again. Would be great if some of the information could be incorporated into /home to encourage people to check there. Not sure what but I think it needs to be incorporated into the rest of the site somehow.
And finally reviews. People put a lot of effort into their reviews (ohlookbirdies and sati spring immediately to mind but there are plenty of others). But they are hidden away at the bottom of /home, and as soon as there are 3 more reviews, their review slips away into obscurity. Would be nice to increase the list of reviews to more than 3 for a start, or to click the reviews section and see the last, say 25 reviews. Perhaps a random review could be displayed in full on /home, or on the "discover movies" page.
Just to add my 2 cents on the tag suggestion, could it be possible to have the name of the actor/actress automatically added as a tag when posting a character shot ? That way we could easily find all of his characters :)
I think the search functions could still be greatly improved. Some ideas: - Search only shots in FF - Search with multiple tags Can't WTM be coded to recognise black and white shots?
Many new features could be useful, but *please* don't forget to include the ',' (comma) character in the list of unsignificant signs in the title's spelling !!! I am very bored to check every time whether I have to type "love, actually" or "love actually". Thanks in advance.
I just thought of a feature I've truly been missing around here:
You can see the shouts others posted on your profile or shots, yet you cannot see your own latest shouts right? Often when I shout I am curious after a while about what others had to say on that shot or my shout. I don't want to favourite all these shots, and therefore I sometimes lose track of the shots I've shouted on. Therefore I would really like to see an overview of your own most recent shouts of some kind.
Idea for a new feature: Sort bookmarks on date of the shot. I usually use my bookmarks to keep track of shots of which I'm certain that I must know it but I can't remember or from shots of which I think I should see the whole movie.
And since bookmarks is sorted on date added I cannot see which of them are already in the archive unless clicking them all one by one.
I think my most wanted new feature was mentioned by m00ch once. It could be called : "upgrade the shot". Because sometimes, you just realize that the quality of a shot in FF (or in the Archive) is actually not that great... and that you could make the exact same shot, but in top notch quality. Then it would be great if you could submit a replacement shot that, if approved by mods, would actually replace the "not so good" original shot. Maybe this feature should be available for Cinematographers (or above) only or for users with more than 200 uploads accepted, so that mods don't get flooded with useless-not-worth-replacement shots. I think this could help WTM look even better, with only high quality shots.