What Features Should ArmchairGM Add?

Someone mentioned a while ago that if you post in response to someone elses post that it should b ranch off that specific comment.

And how about a spellchecker?

If you want to appeal to a more world-wide community, then more sports such as cricket and snooker wouldn't go amiss. Since there are a few of us taking care of those, perhaps more coverage of sports such as Soccer, and sports such as Golf, Tennis, Athletics (Track & Field), even something to do with the Olympic Games. The US Sports are covered brilliantly, in great detail. I think the talk pages etc. are good. The only thing I can think of as a problem is that the attempt to box score all the baseball games, whilst being commendable, is a time-consuming effort. Perhaps you could leave people that are fans of a team to look after that team's pages, or player pages. Also, a better explanation of editing needs to be in place. The current system is good, but as the admin guys will know, I have to ask them for a lot of help with formatting (but then, perhaps that's just me). The voting system is great, and the new top users is great, but could perhaps do with refining, e.g. the last weeks statistics rather than all-time. That way new users could catch up quickly. Other than those things, I think this website is brilliant though.

Enybo you mean a reply to comments?

Alex . . . we are tyring to expand our voerage to Gold, Tennis, and Athletics . . . it will come as more people join up.

I like the idea of having core users take care of box scores.

The only thing Armchair needs is more users!

i would like to see a 'top 5 user list' on the front page. That would really motivate people to contribute. Even with the small top user thing on the front page, I've been making way more contributions.

I think we need to really define what we want to be and try to be that. Being a Sports Wiki is okay, I guess, but much of what this Wiki covers is already prominent on WikiPedia as is.

Yes awright, a reply to comments is what I was trying to get at.

Yes, reply to comments would be great along with an option to edit your post for a limited time after you post it, kinda like Digg. In case you miswrote or something.

I'd like to be able to use wikiformatting in comments :)

To me the site needs more images. Sports is all about visuals and this site could use some photos to make it more vibrant and add some life. I know you may have some copyright issues in terms of using AP photos, but maybe you could set it up so people could e-mail camera phone shots from games directly to a page on Armchair. The images could be sorted by team or sport and used in articles as appropriate. I'm sure fans will capture some interesting stuff. Also sometimes stories drop off the headlines too soon. Some stories deserve to be among the top stories all day long because they are the biggest news of the day. But under the current system everything gets pushed down, so an article about the superbowl winner can get knocked out by something on snooker.

AF I totally agree with you regarding pics...i like the camera phone idea...maybe a voting feature on peoples uploaded pics so a column of pics display on the front page?

Yes, I gonna take a bunch of pics of Pujols and put them on the site.

great idea with the pics. top user pictures would be cool.

i think as the site grows, itll be harder for an article to make it to the "good stuff" section

what does it take right now for an article to be promoted? what will the article promotion criteria in the future?

I think AF is right about importance of a story. Perhaps, there can be another section, where the most voted articles that day are shown, then a discussion can continue for days without fear of it being knocked down. Perhaps, the creator of an article can choose how important his article is, and that can correlate to how long an article stays on the main page.

yeah, the voting thing can be cool but when you have so few people actually participating it's almost pointless.

its based on the votes/comments/age of the article

i wouldnt call it pointless..basically if someone writes a nonsense article, no one will vote for it, and it wont show up anywhere but the new stuff

There are plenty of articles that don't make the front page . . . I love the image idea.

separate posts into categories by sport or something and then you can have the Good Stuff for each category

each sport, team, and player has a good stuff category. ex http://www.a...hp?title=MLB

grizzly adams does have a beard

Yeah, the article voting thing works, I was speaking more on comment voting. A place like digg where you have 50+ people rating something, it's cool. On here, you're not likely to get much more than 5 either way. Aside from that, sports fans tend to be a lot less objective than guys like /.ers or diggers. Still, I love the concept and I hope it works out (which it probably will once we get more users). I think the site could stand to change directions and focus a lot more on the digg concept than the wiki concept personally.

yeah i completely agree darrel..the comment voting thing turns out to be more of a personal war between users, and doesnt have much meaning right now

Darrel what do you mean focus on the digg concept?

what do you guys think of a rankings feature, where anyone could set up an article which would allow you to rank a bunch of players. . . lets say a page for all the 1B in the league, all the 2B in the league? Or a page where people could rank the all-time great Red Sox, Snooker players, etc.

Awrigh, I mean more of the social bookmarking concept like digg.com, where users submit relevant news stories and blog posts. There needs to be a lot more stories displayed, I believe.

i agree with Darrell on that. I think that will be the case, just a matter of getting more users.

I think forums attached to the site would be great, so we have a place to start simple discussions (and a better format in which to have rolling discussions) besides the comment section of articles.

again, thank you to whoever is negatively commenting on every single post I make.

i think that there needs to be a feature where you can have articles read to you by Dr. Sbaitso.

Xinoph, I believe a ubb style forums would be nice but might take away from the opinion section. Just a thought.

PBurke...it seems like someone follows me around and gives me a negative vote on my comments too. But, I guess there's nothing we can do about it.

the site is extremely flexible...you could always create a category called "Forums", and each page created under it is really a thread, with comments enabled...we have tags that output pages based on the criteria you specificy (much like for a players page, it looks under "Derek Jeter Opinions" and only displays those articles)

1) Display more stories on the front page, at least 15. Move the "New Stuff" to a separate link if needed. Stories disappear too quickly.

2) Make the votes more visible, a la the green box on the story page 3) Differntiate between news and opinions - a different link color, or maybe a background color 4) News posts should require less votes/etc to get into the good stuff category - the site's slightly too opinion oriented, IMO

5) Make the news posts links more prominent, maybe even make them links altogether (with a separate comments link, a la digg)

I don't think a forum would talk away from the opinion feature at all. They're totally different things, with totally different purposes. Forums allow for a better back-and-forth discussion than the comments section, and there are times when we want to discuss topics in an ongoing way that the relatively transient nature of articles doesn't allow for....I know once an article vanishes from the front one or two pages, I tend to ignore it.

I very much don't like the idea of allowing users to submit articles that are just links to published articles, as digg does. I think that would take away from a lot of the originality and uniquness that appears on this site. I would worry that even if you included that just as a feature, it would rapidly overwhelm the original material.

uniqueness*! I do like the idea of being able to edit comments for a short while afterwards, for typos. That would make my day.

Xinoph, most "news" submissions are like one sentence and then a link at the bottom of the article (and it's pretty ugly). It would be almost exactly the same thing except the actual article would be much more prominent than the one sentence blurb.

I think the only thing the site really needs is more contributors. With more people filling out the history, bios, and everything else the site would be more complete. And with more people posting game recaps and news, the site would be a great place to go to for news. Right now it's not a very informative site. But with enough users it really could be.

Apparently I forgot to log in....I think more users are all we really need. If there are a lot of contributors here making this a more comprehensive site then it could be great. Right now you go to espn.com for current news. You go to mlb.com for anything espn might have missed. You go to baseball-reference.com for stats. You go to baseballcube.com for old minor league stats. You go to baseballprospectus for sabermetrics. You go to baseballamerica for minor league scouting reports. And none of those pages have much in the way of player bios. And that's just for baseball.....Having all of that on one site is the only thing this site really needs.

Yeah, I think those News submissions are terrible. Actually, Darrel, there are a lot of quality News submissions.

How about a print option for articles (Reformating to print). I like to read in the bathroom, but i don't read this because its hard to print.