Gnomepal

There are a few key features that are important when setting up a community I thought I might add. My personal projects include a podcast network and an artist site that allows artists to share writing, images, audio, and video recordings. These two community sites are entirely different, and will have different needs. Of all the features I have jotted down these 5 seem to ring out as being baseline necessities.

1. Allow the admin the ability to select "featured" posts and content from within the community to share on the main page, while also providing an "autopilot" that would give the admin the option to have the top 5 or so most active threads, items, or posts from within the community automatically set on the front page as featured articles. If the admin so chooses, the system could provide them as "suggestions" for featured status bringing these hot topics to the admin's attention before feature status is granted.

2. Create or allow for the creation of separate RSS feeds for each category of content that a profile adds to the community. For example, if user A posts 50 of their photographs and 5 of their audio recordings, they should have a gallery separate from their music, podcasts, whatever. This would allow someone to direct their fans/followers to their art gallery without having their audio tracks jumbled in the mix. Having a different RSS feed would allow someone to subscribe to user's videos without getting every little twitter update summary, photo upload, etc.

3. It would be nice to have an interoperability built in with multiple forms of implementation. For example, if someone has an OpenID site running gnomepal, their users should be able to fairly easily shake hands with and import profiles from their other gnomepal accounts on other active sites. For admins that chose to opt out of OpenID, a primitive import/export could be made possible allowing users the ability to shake hands and set themselves up in the new community without having to re-enter all the information. Other possibilities using RSS, for example, could be possible pulling someone's profile from multiple sources into their Gnomepal community profile.

4. An admin should have a blanket ability to block certain strings in cases where a community is being barraged by outside interference. Let's say for example, that your site revolves around users sharing poetry. If you have the ability to block out phrases like "sucks" or "stupid" or other less polite nonsense, while allowing original posters the ability to keep those phrases in their posts, if for whatever reason their story has that term in it. One problem I'm seeing with community sites like Youtube for example, is that the site can't become a place of honest critique and idea sharing beyond the initial contribution when half of the comments made are unreasonable and unnecessary trolling. This one was hard to put into words, so forgive me if it doesn't make sense.

5. Users should have the ability to make the rights they chose to have on their content visible and present. Flickr has a great rights management program, and when you view a post from a user you know what license that user has selected to give their peers. This is missing from so many community sites out there and deserves a place in Gnomepal.

Thanks very much,
MR