Thought of a little idea that, while it would take some retooling of the way requests are shown and handled, would help to get the most wanted ones to the front of the queue. My idea is to allow users to “recommend” previously made requests. The requests section could then potentially be formatted with sections for “Most Recommended Requests”, “Newest Requests”, and then possibly a drop-down section of some sort to show the remainder of the requests made. Like I said above, this would ensure that the articles our community desires most would get written post-haste, and would give our writers quality options for potential new articles. Thoughts?
I like the way SB Nation blogs handle it (their “Rec” system gave me the idea for sorting based on “Recommends”). On those, registered users (in our case, I guess it’d apply to everyone, registered or not) see a little “Rec” button at the bottom of every entry, and the total number of “recs” is listed right next to it. It’d be a pretty simple system. Click button, number goes up.
Great idea! I think a system like this would be helpful in terms of sorting through requests and not letting the most wanted requests get left behind. I think it’s worth looking into.
Jordan
5
I like this idea…seems like it would be very helpful.
It’s a good idea, but I don’t think it should be restricted to registered users, since most of our readers are not and we’re writing for *them*. For example, it’d be pretty helpful, both for us and other people, if *unregistered* users went to request a topic, could see that someone else had already requested it, and hit a “vote up” button on an existing request.
Elyne
8
I like this idea i agree with Lewis that that unregistered users should also be able to recommend request since they make up most of our readers. - also something different but related but how about a vote up of articles by users - kinda like wikiHow does featured articles but then by the users, it would be interesting on what users think that are the best articles on wikiHow.
Interesting idea. I’d especially like it if it was integrated with something to deal with duplicate requests. eg. “If your request is similar to one of these existing requests, click recommend. If your title is a unique topic, click create a new request.”
This was exactly the kind of thing I was thinking of.
system
13
I think it’s a good idea too. If it did happen, how would you ‘recommend’ something?
