I’d love a mobile app. My concern with a mobile app is simply whether it would lose too many features. Facebook for Android, for example, makes it really hard for me to do a lot of pretty basic things that I can do on Facebook using a browser (see who likes a post, search friends, search groups).
I’d like to be able to bookmark posts that I like or find useful.
I’m also concerned about “bloat” as I sometimes have to use dial-up. Gmail has an option when you’re loading it to use straight HTML. I like that Gmail has a work-around that appears almost as soon as the site starts loading which enables the site to load faster for dial-up users.
I like the idea of a permanent off-topic forum, but I’m wondering if maybe several forums like “The Menagerie” could be added–Relationships, Career, Academia, Law and Politics, Entertainment, Family Life. It seems like every off-topic day ends up revolving around those things. Who is dumping who, who hates their job and is looking for a change, who is trying to find a major, how ridiculous this new law is, what everyone is reading, what movies people want to see, how to handle unruly teenagers, etc. I think that we end up talking about horses even in off-topic day threads.
I especially like the idea of the “business” forum, because the stuff that borders on advertising is usually the sort of thing we really need to know. In conjunction with a business forum, I would suggest beefing up the polls feature, and making it easier to vote anonymously while commenting publicly.
I won’t use the Western/Reining forum but I have no objections to it being present. I wouldn’t want to get a “Western/Reining” issue in my mailbox, but the occasional article could be interesting.
Couldn’t care less about the smilies. I personally find features like livejournal’s “mood” to be more useful than emoticons.
I would like a wider layout.
I wish the forums had a more intuitive search feature. As it is, it doesn’t do too well with multiple search terms.
Finally, I think it would be cool if COTH did something like WaPo’s weekly chat with Emily Yoffe of Dear Prudence: have a guest moderator every week do a live chat with COTH forum users. One week George Morris could tell us all to do more stirrup-less work, and another week, the Maclay winner could tell us what it’s like to be a teen dream.
) is a forced restriction on image size. No larger than 500 pixels tall or wide. If you upload a picture that is larger than that, it is automatically scaled such that its longest side is no more than 500 pixels.