Author: JT Smith
NewsForge, like all decent Web sites, gets updated periodically. We’re getting ready to do our next update, and would like to hear your ideas on what changes we should make. You can either post your suggestions here or email them to editors@newsforge.com. Should we have more reviews? Should we expand more into book and software reviews, areas we have almost avoided up to now?
Are we placing too much emphasis on outside links and not enough on original reporting? Or is it the other way around?
Are there areas we’re covering too heavily for your taste? Areas to which we should be paying more attention?
Do you like the comics? Not like them?
Any other thoughts, comments or suggestions on content? We’d love to hear them, whether they’re positive or negative.
Site design
Our design is far from perfect. How can we make it better? (No, we can’t remove the ads unless you’re willing to pay for the site out of your pocket.) What about the way we show older NewsForge Reports (original stories) and links? Do you think we’re doing this properly or do you have ideas on how we can do it better?
How about polls? We avoided them at first because everyone seems to have a poll these days, and we worried about following the crowd. Should we think about adding polls now?
What about comments? How should we handle them? Attached to each linked-to story? We really don’t get all that many comments except on a few high-profile reports right now. Should we encourage more comments? If so, how? (When we started the site, our thought was that Slashdot was getting enough comments for a dozen sites, and while NewsForge may be Slashdot’s relative, we certainly didn’t want it to be an identical twin.)
We don’t know everything
This may come as a surprise, but NewsForge editors are not omniscient. We really do want your input, and promise to consider every rational suggestion carefully, and implement as many of your suggestions as we can when we start working on the site update, probably in September.
Thanks in advance for your help,
– Robin “Roblimo” Miller
NewsForge (and OSDN) Editor in Chief
