Re: Big talk timers - they don't do the job intended, get rid of them

Posted by fak, 2012-04-28 17:32 BST

I am also frustrated with the Big Talk timers and feel they stifle conversation (and slow it down to a crashing halt) so I have some suggestions:

1. Retain the timer aspect but reduce the time to 12 or 6 hours (or less). This should prevent people from posting "in anger" as they should have chilled out by then, and is plenty of time to finesse thoughts.


2. Keep the post timer at 24 hours but allow the response to be drafted immediately. This allows people to get their initial response down and refine it later without having to involve other software (which may not be conveniently located to them depending on how they are accessing The Edge).


3. Reward people for participation with "get out of timer" cards. This would require some sort of measure of participation, maybe voting for "helpful" posts, but those people who were contributing positively to the community could be rewarded with not having to wait to post in Big Talk. This could be a one-off once a certain "value" has been achieved, so it would reset, or could be in blocks of e.g. 3.

Some other things that might be nice:

• a visual reminder on the main edge page that you have timers running/available to you. At the moment you only see that you have timers when you go to Big Talk. Reminding people elsewhere might turn more timers set into responses made.

• being able to submit directly without previewing, or having previewed and made edits without having to preview it again. I corrected a typo having previewed a previous post and it was a bit of a pain to have to preview it again to be able to submit it.

• some way of indicating that you agree with what someone has said without having to set a timer in order to say "me too". I really like ravelry's voting buttons (educational, interesting, agree, disagree, love) for this. Or some indicator of how many people have read a Big Talk post. It can be disheartening to set a timer, write a post, and then nothing.