Your ideas for new community features

soadize said:
A vote up/down system on shoutboxes to hide all the spam and highlight good comments.
yeah, brilliant idea. I like how it's done on Youtube.
Soutboxes are full of obscene language. there is no "flag for review" and even permalinks to report them. and anyway, moderators will become crazy to clean all that.

Being a group mod myself, I would like to be notified when a new member joins or someone posts a shout or a new thread in the discussions. As I also created some global tag radios for my groups, I would appreciate some kind of counter that tells me how often they have been played, maybe on the tag pages. A new group radio built from the max. 200 connected artists would be nice, especially if a group mod could decide or offer the members to choose which kind of radio should be the current group radio (member taste, connected artists or any tag radio). I don't think the current solution is the best one, e.g. there are groups that kick out members, because they have the "wrong taste" for "clean" group charts and radio.

And most important: please reveal the mystery how and when these big background pictures are chosen for the header of a global tag page. ;-)

Last but not least: please update the database for new global tags more often than at the moment... it's very discouraging having to wait several weeks for any change in the tag radio programme.

Can't wait to see all the new coming changes! :D

More flexible radio stations that can play tracks from multiple sources you specify. Such as a station that picks up all the connections from a journal or group, any number of your friends' loved or banned tracks or their entire libraries, or just their last 3 months chart.

Make the user's journal page so that it just loads the first few hundred characters of each journal. At the moment it's awkward to browse for one of your journals if it's not in the most recent 4 on your profile.

Sort groups on your profile page by whether you're a leader, not whether you're the founder. I have to dig through my groups list to find a few of the groups I lead, and in groups where I abdicated, I had to quit because I got tired of seeing those groups amongst the 5 on my profile page.

Show connected groups on event pages again. This was really helpful to show which groups are active and interested in upcoming events.

I am super green :)

Babs_05 said:
I say keep them.

I presume the rest of the world doesn't see 'full track' where we do?

I see them in USA, but maybe you meant other countries, beside U.K., Germany and USA?

If we had auto-advance back on albums, like they used to be before you had to start penny-pinching, it would be good.

What really is free and what isn't, what appears in Google search, what people see that leads to assumptions and expectations - this all needs tidying up.

If the on-demand 'beta experiment' were to ever go live, it would mean a higher subscription rate, which was the original idea posed by Warners but Last.fm dawdled over because they were trying to keep things free not fee. But the climate's changed now, people have got their heads around the idea of fee sites. So maybe it's time to launch £5 a month proper on-demand Subscriber+. I would be happy to go up a level for this, I know it's something I already use and would miss if I didn't have it. I would expect auto-advance on albums to be restored, though.

Maybe that could be the difference between subs and subs+. That subs+ get auto-advance and unlimited full plays for on-demand tracks. Regular subs would understand that to pay the standard rate would mean how things are now. ish. with a bit of tidying. So they still get the sense of supporting the site and getting what we have now without breaking the bank. I think it's important not to lose E£$3 level.

Assuming it's all do-able of course! Whatever is practical, etc etc.

Yes, I agree here Babs - I am one who is ready and willing to purchase a premium or gold sub for £5 or $5 ;)


I love Tecfan's Group Dashboard idea. I didn't know how much I needed it! +1 from me.

There was an idea someone had a long time ago re the Library - the ability to add notes and scribbles wherever we want. I still would like that if we could make it happen. I'll see if I can find the original thread... here http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/547223



I Like my 'Playlists' as well as Tag radio, so do not want to see these go away, but would like to see them more open to personal touches. Would love to change the frame color to 'green' hues, instead of all black and grey.

rwitte said:
+1 for voting on journals with the results used to influence recommended reading, possibly take it further by allowing journals to be tagged and allowing tag pages in recommended reading.

Certainly! Have heard about other possibilities with journals too. Voting on them, could help promote the best ones to the top of a list, for choosing which journals should be featured in other possible ways.

I read flaneur's comments carefully - figuring out your unique selling points and enhancing them is only part of the story - you need to de-emphasise (but not necessarily remove) some other facets so that new users are channelled in the right direction and then market the USP features so that non-users get to hear about them.

Hmmm - I see community as interactions between numbers of people - in other words, groups.

The ability to change group leaders and pick up leadership of abandoned groups.

The old "interesting things to read" that disappeared long ago was good for the most part - I try to keep up on group posts now with this, but it will only show the newest post date. (Yes, I could extend it, but I can't be bothered.)

A compatibility meter for group membership (for music oriented groups anyway) might be nice - something like Anthony's page.

Something to keep track of journals posted - e.g. someone mentioned getting notified if there is a change - like a pending journal entry.

From a more general community standpoint, separating artists of the same name would likely reduce conflicts between fans of the disparate artists. No, I don't know how to do that ...

Okay, they're not new but ...

I'm not sure if anyone else would be interested in this, but perhaps an icon beside a loved track, showing you've loved it already, within the software. And maybe, if you've added it to a playlist, "'song name here' is in ___ playlist." With the option to show/not to show, for the people who don't want to see it.

A "Friends Loved Tracks" radio station would be supercool!

HodgeStar said:
Bloopy said:
Make the user's journal page so that it just loads the first few hundred characters of each journal. At the moment it's awkward to browse for one of your journals if it's not in the most recent 4 on your profile.- Yes, something like that. E.g fmera's journal page takes forever to load.i agree to bloopy's suggestion - we need journal blurbs/excerpts. the present way is rubbish.

meanwhile, HodgeStar, you could browse by titles:
/user/fmera/journal/2010/02
/user/fmera/journal/2009
/user/fmera/journal/2008

Another one, Bring back some widgets. Not the playable radio ones which I understand could be costly but things like the old album/artist quilt. An upgrade allowing more intuitive design of the image charts would be nice too. People seeing your charts round the web must surely drive traffic to the site. I've been asked about "how did you get that music chart" a few times on other forums.

electrophile888 said:
A "Friends Loved Tracks" radio station would be supercool!

Would definitely love this. Taking the idea a step further, it would be cool if there was a friends page that had a weekly chart and radio generated by you and your friends. Because some or all of your friends are likely to have different friends that aren't on your friends list, these pages would be unique to each user and only viewable by that user - just like the home page. Or maybe this should just appear on the home page somewhere.

It's not really a community feature per se, since the view would be a private one, but a friends chart and radio (and especially loved tracks radio) would certainly encourage music discovery and interaction with other users.

Likewise, a neighbourhood page would also be a welcome addition with the same features mentioned above.

Anyway, I'd love to see friend generated charts and radios become available.

for some reason the post bodies were increased a long time ago, whereas the actual post stayed the same (hint: check the huge space next to your posts, then check the length of the actual heading). why create an extra space if there is no use of it? useless, if you ask me.

if you want more people on the forums, how about making them more viewable, like you obviously originally intended? -.-

also, "hiding the recent activity from myself" option would be golden.

and apparently, finding friends and the epic "coming soon" is not even necessary to mention -.-