Your ideas for new community features

* The main one - more ways to pay if people want to subscribe. PayPal has too many limitations worldwide.

* I'd like to see improvements to journals so they have more blog features - the ability to write and save without posting, so I can start one a few days earlier and keep adding to it till it's ready.

Alongside that, improvements to BBCode buttons, particularly access - it gets more and more difficult the longer the journal.

Improvements to editing so there isn't that moment of confusion when you've made a change to a long journal then can't find your place because suddenly you're not where you just were.


* Editing posts in forums - we should stay with the post we just edited, not jump to the top of the page.


* Playlists - need a major overhaul. Bit useless as they are. If we have the ability to move tracks around manually, the assumption is we can influence order of play. Half of that is half-baked. I imagine you're doing something with them already, so I wait to see!

* Kill the players on our Profiles.

* mass activity - i.e. mass love, mass ban, mass delete, mass tag etc. So a button top of each page in Recently Listened or our Libraries where we can tick all, then make whatever change we want to make with a dropdown list of options. Bit like how things are in the Inbox.

* Talking of which! Filters in the Inbox - so we can view just messages or just recos or other shared items.


* tag radios - songs are queued up 5 at a time, it's just that we can't see them. Can we see them? That's basically what We7 did, they opened up what can be seen so we can influence what plays next. If we can skip / ban before songs play, it will feel interactive even if it really isn't. Over at We7 (if you're interested!) you can see what's in the queue and you can also influence what plays next, you can leave it as it is or drag a song from anywhere on the site and add it to the queue. But that's probably extremely expensive, so a version of that would feel good without adding to streaming costs.


(I did wait for Tecfan, honest! Drummed my fingers and everything). : )

Wow... and nobody mentioned "On demand plays yet... get them out of the beta!!
Or more precise, get them into beta, and make that beta accessible for human beings ;)
And for the rest... with the two above me ;)

Jester-NL said:
Wow... and nobody mentioned "On demand plays yet... get them out of the beta!!
Or more precise, get them into beta, and make that beta accessible for human beings ;)Am I the only one who favours get rid of them altogether? (except for 'free download' tracks, which are already clearly indicated anyway)

Given the obviously-complex licensing issues involved, and the confusion that the on-demand has introduced (e.g. "only 3 plays even if I'm a subscriber?", "how come I can listen to some tracks in full but not others", "if an entire album is available on-demand, why do I have to click on each track individually to listen to it", "why can I listen to individual tracks on-demand but 'Play Artist Radio' is still a mix of other artists?", etc...), and the competing on-demand offerings from other companies who are still burning through their startup cash, I personally would prefer Last.fm to position itself clearly as a radio service, rather than on-demand. At the moment it's doing a bit of both, and causing confusion for many users.

Of course, the alternative is to launch a full on-demand offering which is available to everyone everywhere. But I know which one is quicker and cheaper ;)

Babs_05 said:
(I did wait for Tecfan, honest! Drummed my fingers and everything). : )

:->, I was playing some hardcore Bad Company 2, so my thoughts was on killing Americans and Russians :(

</quote section>

I'm gonna copy the PM I sent to Thaelvyn, I know not everybody will agree with the notifications proposal..

I know it's a mess, I just wrote stuff as it popped up into my head ^^

First, thanks for the initiative! I appreciate it.

Second, I just want to mention what's wrong:
1: Lack of features to follow up your actions
2: Lack of friend features
3: Lack of notification options
4: Groups are useless

I'm not gonna go into detail.. just gonna jump on some of my proposals:

Notifications. Yeah, I know Facebook has them too, but it's the single greatest feature that will keep people on the site. Oh, somebody answered on your forum post! Wow, somebody joined my group! Yey, my artist got a new shout! You see where I'm going? You have any idea how much work it is checking out all my 100 groups for discussion answers, shoutbox activity, join activity and article activity? And then checking out my artist(s), all of the albums and every single track for shouts, tags, loves and stuff? It's just not working, which is why we absolutely need notifications.

Of course, we also need a lot of settings and filters. Not gonna list them all.. it will be obvious.

Btw, great notification events: "you got a new top artist", "Artist X became the top artist of this week with y plays", "Your top 500 band X has released a new album, in case you didn't notice", etc..

2: friend features - goes under notifications. A friend loved a track? Notification (configurable, as mentioned).

So, we have a loved tracks feed, a recent friend tracks feed (not real-time :\) and an event feed. What about group joinings? Friendship alerts? New friend journals (I know this is in the recommended reading, which is beta)

about groups.. I've heard it some times from staff members when asked about "reply"/"discussion" features in artist shoutboxes (it's really hard to have a discussion): "make a group"... well.. groups are useless.

As I mentioned earlier, how are we supposed to keep updated on 100 groups? 200? 300? Impossible.

So my suggestion:

A group dashboard. In fact, I'd like a totally new dashboard - but maybe a Facebook-like front page is not very wanted).

Anyway, a group activity overview page. New shouts, new discussions, new joins and leaves, description text updates, new articles, chart updates.. endless possibilities. Groups are where people really should connect, but instead most of them are used for games and some interesting, but short discussions..


So yes. A short conclusion:
*Notifications (of everything - we're in 2010, people _LOVE_ updates, information and friends - those who does not can filter it out or turn it off)
*Group dashboard

And of course, please, for heavens sake, repair our reply tracker, recommended reading, friend finder and much more)

Babs_05 said:
* I'd like to see improvements to journals so they have more blog features - the ability to write and save without posting, so I can start one a few days earlier and keep adding to it till it's ready.

Alongside that, improvements to BBCode buttons, particularly access - it gets more and more difficult the longer the journal.

Improvements to editing so there isn't that moment of confusion when you've made a change to a long journal then can't find your place because suddenly you're not where you just were.

I also want some journal changes, like support for anchor links (links within the journal) and [ venue ] links.

I think the most important thing is to finally re-implement group recommendations. and please take the personal recommendations out of the inbox again - it's irritating.

StudleyUK said:
Jester-NL said:
Wow... and nobody mentioned "On demand plays yet... get them out of the beta!!
Or more precise, get them into beta, and make that beta accessible for human beings ;)Am I the only one who favours get rid of them altogether? (except for 'free download' tracks, which are already clearly indicated anyway)

Given the obviously-complex licensing issues involved, and the confusion that the on-demand has introduced (e.g. "only 3 plays even if I'm a subscriber?", "how come I can listen to some tracks in full but not others", "if an entire album is available on-demand, why do I have to click on each track individually to listen to it", "why can I listen to individual tracks on-demand but 'Play Artist Radio' is still a mix of other artists?", etc...), and the competing on-demand offerings from other companies who are still burning through their startup cash, I personally would prefer Last.fm to position itself clearly as a radio service, rather than on-demand. At the moment it's doing a bit of both, and causing confusion for many users.

Of course, the alternative is to launch a full on-demand offering which is available to everyone everywhere. But I know which one is quicker and cheaper ;)

I tend to agree with this. It wouldn't bother me if on demand where abolished. Looking at the features in the new client whenever that finally become available I'll be more then satisfied with the radio service.

They need to make a decision one way or another, either roll out the proper promised on demand service or remove it and go back to how things where.


Another unrelated request, finally bring out of beta the recommended reading and give it a box on the home page. In fact lets have more community features on the home page in general so people know about them and use them.

A friends request should allow an accompanying message instead of requiring a separate PM or Shout.

reply tracking including shouts

subscribe and unsubscribe in the reply tracker

tracking of shares (has my friend listened to my recommendation yet?)

tracking of friend requests (was my friend request denied?, who have I outstanding friend requests with)

Allow changes of group leader, especially for leaderless groups [this last one must be moderator free so you need a mechanism like an electronic petition that requires a certain percentage of group members to sign to trigger a leadership contest.

As discussed incessantly in the topic "The amount of trolling, flaming and spamming on this website is amazing"

Shoutboxes (particularly for major artists) are an abomination at the moment. Spam is a big problem; sure, we can report individual users, but then that's a lot of work for moderators. On nearly every major website which allows user comments, there are +/- voting buttons, and a Report button to flag abuse. Last.fm is crying out for this (almost literally).

For those of us who make radios and playlists to share, I'd like some notification that someone is listening. Even if someone is just listening to my Library or Loved Tracks, I'd like to know.

I think Group Leaders need to be notified of pending applications to join.

I'd like to be able to click on a 'more' button and see a page of recent visitors. It's fine on slow days, 6 is more than enough, but on a busy one, 6 is nothing.

Library - list views! My perennial request. List views for everything!

c99koder said:
+1 for group activity notifications. I would love to be notified about new posts in the groups I manage instead of having to refresh the pages all day :)

(ignore my staff icon in this thread -- I'm not on the web team)

Yup +1 from me here as well, this is definitely something I will bring up to the devs, as well as the notifications you mentioned (plus the other things... :) )

Thanks for those feedbacks guys!

@JustSomeOldJoe: I will come back to you about your question, as you might understand, I have to double check a few things :)

And please do something with event discussions - they are rarely active now.
Shouts cannot be tracked, and journal posts are too complex to create.