I don't use the Xoops notifications, but for forum sites, I find the navigation feature of "last threads participated in" indispensible. (That's here under "View Account," and while per-post vs. per-thread is redundant for my needs, I'm sure other people like it... IIRC, DSLReports gives it to you right on the forum page(s), but it's been a while.)
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For the sort of people who like notifications (I'm not, or rather, I may as well 'pull' that info when I'm ready to sit down and log in, versus having them pop up at me over the course of other_life), perhaps there's a way to work some personalized magic with RSS? Or is that worse than using a mail or IM gateway, because it has to get polled? (I assume all the notification junkies like RSS, just like they like ICQ and AIM and Trillian and anything else that goes beep beep beep. ;-))
[That's in the sense of having a dynamic RSS 'page?' per-user that their RSS-reader software could poll, not useless Slashboxes all over the front page.]
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Never been a big fan of "Portals," either, but sites naturally become same as users demand everything and the kitchen sink too. For something that wants to be a "community" news site, I like having a visible slushpile (as ANN does), so the editors are free to edit (which can add value in terms of perspective/civility/time-savings), but the community's also free to rattle around whatever it wants (checks and balances against biases real or imagined, as when y'all went to work for a certain company)... That's covered over here through the prominence of the forums anyway.
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All I can think of on the 'productivity' end would be project-hosting (sites doing that already), documentation/driver hosting (other sites doing that already), and mail and user site hosting (Yahoo-Geocities does that already)... On the forum and newshosting end, more sugar always eases interaction even if things are theoretically possible already; image hosting for the fora would reduce the number of 'I'd give you a picture/show_report but I don't know how!' posts (in trade for disk use and the boobies problem)... something like an oekaki/whiteboard applet probably wouldn't be used much, but comes in handy when you have to show someone a diagram of how something wires up, and so on. Even people who hate the smilies fall into using them, because they add that wider range of expression. :-o
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Edit: Oh yeah, per DSLReports, automatically appending a little 'Post edited on...' notification is a nice touch, so people can do the edit thing... but not mess with the minds of those who read prior. (I'm an 'Edit' addict myself, and with timings, it tells you something about the intention... 30 seconds after posting and it's a correction, days later and it's rewriting history.)
...and being able to relogin a timed-out session without losing a post (I'm a lucky Mozilla user who doesn't lose forms on 'Back,' I'm sure long-winded IE users tear their hair out) would probably also be cool. (Just need to cache the submitted form for the timeout period of the login page/object/process/whatever, instead of discarding it with the "You don't have the right!" check...)
