Here are a few random ideas that you might like to consider.
These aren't requests as such and they probably won't make you any money and may involve a bit of work. However, they may give ET some USPs over other forums competing in the same space and could also provide some interesting metrics:
1) ET market barometer. When people log in, they can be presented with a quick poll: Do you think the markets are going up/down/don't know today? They answer the question and proceed on to the forums as usual. People are only asked the question once per day with an easy option to not to vote at all each time.
This data can be collected to provide an ET sentiment indicator which can be plotted on the home page in graphical format along with historical performance etc. It would be interesting to see if it turns out to be a contrarian indicator or not.
2) Re-vamped ET Chat. I would hazard a guess that a significant number of people are not aware of ET chat or find it a little too cumbersome. A lot of the threads in the Trading forum would actually be better suited to a real-time chat environment whereby people just want to do a brain dump every 10 seconds.
So, the idea is to have a newer and improved chat room which would allow you to dump the last ten or so most recent lines of chat directly on the home page with a quick link for people to join in. Kind of like teaser text. Not sure if my description makes sense.
3) Portal style interface for the home page. Perhaps three column layout for the forum summaries rather than one long list. I believe you were already considering an idea like this some time ago. Although, not forums, sites like www.theregister.co.uk manage to fit in 3 columns plus ads and other links without sacrificing font-size and readability. I realize some thread titles are quite long though.
4) A complete look and feel revamp. Even if it's web2.0. You know you want to!
These aren't requests as such and they probably won't make you any money and may involve a bit of work. However, they may give ET some USPs over other forums competing in the same space and could also provide some interesting metrics:
1) ET market barometer. When people log in, they can be presented with a quick poll: Do you think the markets are going up/down/don't know today? They answer the question and proceed on to the forums as usual. People are only asked the question once per day with an easy option to not to vote at all each time.
This data can be collected to provide an ET sentiment indicator which can be plotted on the home page in graphical format along with historical performance etc. It would be interesting to see if it turns out to be a contrarian indicator or not.
2) Re-vamped ET Chat. I would hazard a guess that a significant number of people are not aware of ET chat or find it a little too cumbersome. A lot of the threads in the Trading forum would actually be better suited to a real-time chat environment whereby people just want to do a brain dump every 10 seconds.
So, the idea is to have a newer and improved chat room which would allow you to dump the last ten or so most recent lines of chat directly on the home page with a quick link for people to join in. Kind of like teaser text. Not sure if my description makes sense.
3) Portal style interface for the home page. Perhaps three column layout for the forum summaries rather than one long list. I believe you were already considering an idea like this some time ago. Although, not forums, sites like www.theregister.co.uk manage to fit in 3 columns plus ads and other links without sacrificing font-size and readability. I realize some thread titles are quite long though.
4) A complete look and feel revamp. Even if it's web2.0. You know you want to!
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