TPR Member Profiles - What would YOU change?

[televisedconfession]

what about the ability to create backgrounds, or color, and text options? something to make our profiles a little more unique and individualized? maybe just color?

 

but i defiantly like the ideas so far, though with photos, defiantly tag rides, not people (moose stole that idea from me! ) ?! so that it could be easily found in an archive!

 

if my ideas are too big... go ahead and ignore me! haha

[ParkTrips]

I'd stay away from the calender meet up idea. I think it'd be a complete mess after a week. Too many people thinking they're going, posting, and then they don't. It'd be mass chaos.

it seems to work ok on Ted's site (which I am constantly reminded of when reading suggestions here... Ted put a lot of these things on his site and they are quite cool!)

[signal]

I stated an idea earlier, but now I'm going to tell you in detail.

 

There can be an album for each park, somewhat like what it is in the park index. It could be a Flickr style thing, where people upload all their pictures of that park to the album, then categorize them after you add them. People can maybe add their comments below the pictures or they could tag them. There could also maybe be a park video section, where you can stream all the videos of that park from your browser.

[FeelTheFORCE]

in our information under our avatar you should put a spot where we cn put our home park up!

 

Yeah that and perhaps our favorite coaster.

[Carnage]

what about the ability to create backgrounds, or color, and text options? something to make our profiles a little more unique and individualized? maybe just color?

 

Please no.

 

Give people control over stuff like that and what you end up with is ugly, hard to read pages.

 

Just look at Myspace pages. You can't even read half of those pages they're so ugly. Makes you wonder if the majority of people on Myspace are color blind.

[televisedconfession]

^yeah, i thought about that too with the pictures and stuff, but just a little color addons would be nice. it just gets monotonous to me. the way i see it, those ugly, hard to read pages just reflect on their character. a little color never hurt anybody.

[MG]

I like the idea of an "about me" section and a photo album. Maybe a video window as well linking to a video in the forum (or on youtube), but with youtube it might be a bit harder to limit what appears on people's profiles.

I also think it would be nice if we could change little things about the appearance of our profiles. You could have a selection of a couple of backgrounds which are all readable. Maybe also a way for people to rearrange the layout of items on their profile. Just to allow people to have a bit of a change.

Good luck Robb! I think everyone is going to have very different opinions on this.

[Cameron]

I love the idea of an "about me" description, plus some space for a few personal photos .. However I feel that a full-featured album with tagging and comments would be pretty redundant - there's nothing wrong with linking to Flickr or SmugMug (both of which are fantastic). Maybe add some space for people to add links to their off-site stuff?

 

How about something where someone can list up-coming trips? Then if one of your "friends" makes a change to their plans, you'd get an email or PM.

 

The "thread archive" idea is freaking brilliant!

 

Cameron.

[Tanks4me05]

I like the idea of being able to catalog your threads. A photo album is absolutely in the works. Just need to figure out how many feature I can add to it.

 

We are doing a major overhaul to the park index pages and one of the additions will be that TPR members can add comments and reviews to parks similar to have Trip Advisor works.

 

--Robb

 

Awesome is all I can say.

 

Somewhat off topic, but not really (I think): What is the reason why we can't make our own user titles?

[ahecht]

Ideally, it would be nice to have the whole picture uploading overhauled, so that pictures uploaded to a thread go into your profile album. Then, have a tagging system to tag images with park names, ride names, and usernames, so that I could easily search for all pictures with a tag of "behemoth" or "hersheypark".

[TheRapidsNerd]

Ditto on thread cataloging. It'd be most helpful to have a list of those to quickly refer too.

 

That aside, I'm a happy camper.

[Hobbesx2]

I would like to see a section that lets us set the default post options, so you don't need to keep unchecking 'notify me' and checking 'attach sig', it will automatically do that.

[Ccron10]

I like the idea of being able to catalog your threads. A photo album is absolutely in the works. Just need to figure out how many feature I can add to it.

 

We are doing a major overhaul to the park index pages and one of the additions will be that TPR members can add comments and reviews to parks similar to have Trip Advisor works.

 

--Robb

 

Awesome is all I can say.

 

Somewhat off topic, but not really (I think): What is the reason why we can't make our own user titles?

 

I agree. I don't really like my usertitle. I know I could ask Elissa to change it, but I never really got around to it and I don't really want one.

[Carnage]

I would like to see a section that lets us set the default post options, so you don't need to keep unchecking 'notify me' and checking 'attach sig', it will automatically do that.

 

Those options have always been able to be set in your profile settings.

[Wood Dragon 1988]

My only comment is that I would really like to see a top-ten feature.

[mcjaco]

^ Top ten what?

 

Top ten parks? Top ten steel coasters? Top ten woodies? Top ten hot chicks?

 

More descriptive let's Robb know what you really want.

[ParkTrips]

How about Top Ten Dave Thomas Quotes?

[coasterdude5]

^ Yeah, I've wondered why the coaster community doesn't have one...

 

I'd like to see a spot for your top 10 coasters, maybe divided between, steel, wood, park, etc.

 

It'd be great to have all the photos you uploaded all in one spot. You could arrange the photos into different albums.

 

Thanks for continuing to improve the site!

[AllenA07]

^Before my site closed that was actually what I was attempting to do, however it proved to be way more work then I had anticipated. Also it would of had a different feel to it because this was before Facebook or Myspace really took off. What I had hoped to do was give everybody a small amount of room to post their own pictures(maybe 10-20 per person) a place to write ride reviews, and a place to upload RCT tracks/parks. At the same time I had begun rebuilding the site using Dreamweaver, and ultimately it became too time consuming and the project (and the site) sputtered to a stop. However I still maintain that it was a good idea.

[Meteornotes]

How about Top Ten Dave Thomas Quotes?

 

Would not most of these be against the TOS, not to mention violating many international and galactic laws? I'm guessing so.

 

And I vote against people being able to change their member title. It's another thing that would need to be policed. This way there is some control over it.

 

I'm not sure I'd go full force into making some sort of social networking site, at least right away. If that's what you're intereested in, why not just use Facebook? I'd certainly go with more personal profiles iwth a picture area and such. And I would agree to NOT let people add their own backgrounds and colors. Myspace is unreadable at this point because of this very feature.

 

dt

[ETapley0687]

Yea as cool as it sounds, I don't think making a social networking site would do this any better. If thats the case, there could be a facebook group devoted to themeparkreview.

 

I like the personal photo albums and top ten lists ideas. I don't have anything else in mind though. I'll give it some thought and post back.

 

It sounds like the changes are going to be good though!

[Wes]

I think any sort of social networking is a lot of legwork for Robb and whoever has to code it WITHOUT much benefit to the site overall. We already have a forum, there doesn't need to be another way to communicate with other members. Besides, social networking sites easily become outdated...4 years ago it would have been designed around the Friendster model, then it would have been Myspace, now Facebook. Who know what's next? If you're a big site like Myspace, you can recode easily, for smaller niche sites like TPR, it's much harder to stay on whatever the latest SN fads would be. I just don't see the end benefit to it.

[prototech]

Do you plan on upgrading to phpBB3, Robb? phpBB is dropping support for phpBB2 next year.

[robbalvey]

^ Yes. I will do the conversion at some point. It hasn't really been necessary for us to even update to the latest version of PHPBB2 and at the moment I'm not sure that PHPBB3 would add many more features to this forum. I am of the opinion that I will not make any major changes to the site unless it sigficantly improves the site. I haven't seen exactly what PHPBB3 would improve for us.

 

Anyone else used both versions that can offer some insight?

 

As for a social networking addition to TPR, I don't really think that's what we are going for.

 

It's more about trying to give the profile page a little more purpose, because right now they really aren't much.

 

I would like to add a user photo gallery, a place to make some comments, and maybe for you to add friends, but on a VERY limited basis.

 

Adding a top ten list for coasters and parks, an 'about me section' and maybe a list of topics you've started would be cool too.

 

But don't expect anything like MySpace on TPR.

 

--Robb

[jackskellington101]

As for a social networking addition to TPR, I don't really think that's what we are going for.

 

My stance is that forums and the like already are social networking sites. Is there a society? Do we network? That would be social networking, in my book. It may be a network surrounding a certain niche, but really when you really use the social networking sites, people find you for certain aspects and common interests. By the sheer fact that we're all here, that shows we all have some common interest. So TPR, and other forums like it, are social networks v2 (v1 being the newsgroups), in my opinion.

 

We can already make friends using the "buddy lists", but I think a cool thing to add would be a way to watch your buddies do on the site, having a feed of what they post on your personal profile. That's where the RSS that you mentioned in the other question (http://www.themeparkreview.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=43477&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0) might come in handy. Using RSS, the person could subscribe to an individualized RSS feed of what your buddies on TPR are posting. That might be going way out there, and yes I did steal that idea directly from Digg, but it could still work. Same could be said for the individual's posts as well, having them be the RSS feeds as well and having people subscribe to that one. This is kind of blending the two questions together, but it's a thought. I also like the top ten lists, but the photo gallery should be very limited. The Photo TRs are the place where one's photography is shown off, but the galleries are where the "cream of the crop" pictures are showcased. Something like that.

 

Yea as cool as it sounds, I don't think making a social networking site would do this any better. If thats the case, there could be a facebook group devoted to themeparkreview.

 

Well, actually, there is one. I made it a while ago and just let it roll. It's currently got 174 members with little to no promotion.

 

Stuart