My wis.dm - Have It Your Way

Today we've introduced a whole new "my wis.dm".  In many ways, this is the realization of what we intended my wis.dm to be all along: a place for you to have a dashboard, a console view, customized with pointers to all the content you care about.  To borrow a classic fast-food slogan, now you can finally "Have it your way."

What does this mean in practice?  Well, you'll see two areas of the my wis.dm feeds view, an "inbox", which will include personally-relevant info like questions from your friends, and replies to your comments.  You'll also see a "subscriptions" area, where you can control all sorts of other info you might want to keep tabs on.  In both of these areas, you can see just "new" stuff, that you haven't clicked on or answered.  Or you can see "all" items.  To keep you and our databases sane, this will give you a 7-day backlog of items from your feed.

So how do you use it?  Here are some examples...

• Want to see a flood of every question being posted, anywhere on wis.dm? (we know this has been a popular request from a minority set of true wis.dm power users)  Just subscribe to every Scene, and you'll see all new Bits consolidated in your my wis.dm subscriptions tab.  Or be more discerning, and stick to the scenes you care about most.
• Have a favorite Bit type?  Subscribe just to Polls, or just to "Would You Rather" questions, if you like!
• Want to keep tabs on a favorite topic?  Maybe you are an expert in photography, and want to be sure you get ahold of all the content on wis.dm with topic "photography".  Just subscribe to that topic, and it'll be delivered right into your feed.

Simple, eh?  There's a lot going on to make all this happen, but we think it'll be a far superior way to consume great wis.dm content, and to keep tabs on all your discussions happening around the growing wis.dm world.

As always, your thoughts are most welcome, email feedback@wis.dm.  Most of the changes you see today have come from trying hard to accommodate all the varied requests we get from you!

Keep wis.dming, and enjoy!

Usability is a tough nut

Team wis.dm is always listening to feedback from our members.  And the feedback comes in at all different levels.  Veteran users, new registrants, site visitors; internet power-users, and people using their first web-connected computers!

Providing the best usability for all these groups is a real challenge, and it's ongoing.  In efforts to strike the right balance, you probably saw some changes on wis.dm today.

Start a Discussion - We've consolidated the location for posting your own content.  You can now ask questions using the "start a discussion" button permanently under your login information.  Easy, always available, and clear for all the new users who want to know how to get involved!

Comment System - a big overhaul to the comment system also went live today.  By implementing true threaded comment behavior, we've cut down on the noise factor from people quoting each-other's comments, and allowed you to better keep track of discussion within a post.

Formatted Content - finally, in the comment system as well as around wis.dm in general, you'll see a new way to format rich content (bold, italics, links, etc.)  We've picked an industry standard for forums, BBCode, as our formatting language.  For some users who have been using HTML to format, this will be a change.  We went this direction for two reasons. 1) Basic formatting just works better.  A number of hacks necessary to cleanly format non-HTML content were removed, so users just looking to leave their simple thoughts will have more reliable results. 2) We want to protect our site and you all from malicious content that can be put in the page to reformat it, spam, or spread viruses.  The best way to do this (and the way that almost every other forum/comments system out there works) is to keep control over the types of formatting allowed.  We hope that it meets almost everyone's needs for self-expression, and that it helps keep an atmosphere of sanity to the great wis.dm discussion threads!

Usability is a tough nut to crack.  So as always, send your thoughts to feedback@wis.dm.  What's better, what's worse, how would you solve these problems best for all the diverse members of the community?

Keep wis.dming!