This is a blog prompted by Hull about potential ideas for improvement in the site.

For starters, just a reminder that it's difficult as it is to get onto disabled users' profiles, so we can't check perma' reasons and stuff.

Anyway, onto the exciting stuff.

Painting Updates

Both of these are covered in Crym's similar blog, but I'll just reiterate them.

A painting transfer system would be good. It would reduce the number of people giving out their passwords for people, such as myself or other artists on the site, to draw them avatars. I like the idea of being able to get someone to draw you an avatar, but I think the safest way would be if there were a system where you could request to use someone else's painting as your avatar, thus avoiding the problem of having to log onto someone else's account.

Either the painting could stay in the original artist's gallery, or it could also appear in the recipient's galery as well, in which case there ought to be a little link to the original artist's profile or gallery just so people know.
A system like that would still allow people the fun of having their own custom avatars drawn, but without the unsafe aspect of having to lend them your password. While it's the case that I've never abused someone's account while drawing them an avatar, the same can't be said for everyone.

Another painting update idea is featured paintings. It would add a bit more fun and an extra dimension into the painting system. Basically, every week Paintmins can feature a few paintings which are particularly nice or worthy of appreciation, and then they van be displayed on the homepage for people to see. Y'know, this is DSiPaint, so it'd be nice if there were an extra element to the painting system.

I think it would probably be best if people submitted their art to be featured, kind of like with blogs, since some people may not want their paintings to be displayed. It would also give an extra job to paintmins, which would be nice.

Another idea relates more to the library area of the site. Hull himself said that he was tired of all the blogs on the front page being short stories or poems, so maybe we could incorporate fiction blogs into the library system.

If everyone had their own personal library of stories and poetry, and also access to others' libraries of prose, then not only would the blogs section be less cluttered with poetry and stories, but would add some more structure, content and customisation to the library system. Perhaps there could be a search for different categories/genres, and you could set aside series' of books for when you have an ongoing thing? I'm not sure exactly how much time you'd like to devote to this. However you could, if it became large enough, have a new kind of admin for the library, maybe to feature stories and such. I know one or two people who would be enthusiastic about such a position.

Also, one extra thing, it would be good if chatmins could comment on private profiles as well as public ones, since we may need to warn people about vulgarity or whatever. I know this is kinda straying into the profilemins' jobs, and I don't want to make them redundant, but there have been one or two cases where it would have been very useful.