A Wish List for GetGlue, part Two

In line with my earlier wish-list for GetGlue Features and Improvements, here are a few more that have been mentioned to me or have tripped through my brain, continuing from where the last list left off:

7. The ability to view the leaderboards on the website without having to dig through your subscription lists.

EDIT:  It has been pointed out to me that the Leaderboards can be easily found under Explore > Explore Users. If they'd marked it as the leaderboards, I could have saved my time in typing this section. *D'OH!*

I didn't even know this page existed until I wanted to hunt down something that I knew one of the people I subscribed to had checked in to. I hit my subscriptions and noticed the Top Users sections at the side. Clicking on one of them, I was brought to a leaderboard page. I was shocked! If I'd known that this page existed I would have been using it to subscribe to some of the other top users a long time ago!  There needs to be an easily findable link elsewhere on the site, above and beyond the link that's at the bottom of each profile page that directs you to the Guru leaderboard.  This brings me to...

8. An explanation of how the leaderboards work for the new people.
Even after finding the boards, I have to admit to initially being as confused as hell as to how they worked. Even now I could only say I'm "pretty sure" of their function. They appear to be based around your aggregate point total for the last seven days with regards to the meta-topic at hand, which makes sense. The problem I see with this is that after one goes through their initial "Feeding Frenzy" of Likes and Saving (which artificially inflates their score) they then have two options: go back to a normal user level of only checking-in to the things that truly interest them (which will eventually normalize their score), or continue clicking "Like" on everything under the sun (which will keep their score artificially inflated). Now don't get me wrong - I'll freely admit to doing the latter to inflate my sticker count (Am I actually a huge fan of the Twilight series? Nope. I think it presents a candy-coated image of a pedophilliac vampire man-child and a young woman who stays in an abusive relationship for all the wrong reasons. But I digress.), but there needs to be a sharper limiter to the setup, such as not counting any points you've earned towards an item until you hit "Fan" status with your fifth valid check-in. A set-up like this might also put the brakes on some of the single-check-in Guru-steals we see going on.

9. Knock it off with the time-zone lock on the stickers.
There are few things more annoying to a sticker-hunter than seeing someone else earn a sticker and not being able to get the same sticker yourself, even though you're doing the exact same thing that they are. This totally rears its ugly head when it comes to one thing: release-day stickers for various events.
A good example of this is the sticker for the Hawaii International Film Festival. It went live on 14 Oct 2010 and once the date hit on the far side of the Eastern Hemisphere everyone in that time zone started to be able to earn the sticker via checking in. The ability to earn the sticker then progressed across the globe as midnight hit in the various time zones, leaving those who wanted to just check-in and get their sticker tapping their foot in frustration. In fact, some of the last people to be able to earn the sticker were the people in Hawaii, where the actual festival was being held. There's a simple solution for this: make everyone wait. Don't set the sticker to a Live status until the actual start of the event in its actual time zone. Sure, there'll be a bum rush on the server by the sticker hunters trying to get a first to find, but it'd be less annoying that seeing someone else get the sticker first just because of their geographical location.

10. Create a bug report page where users can go to report issues and automate the tracking.
Right now the current method of reporting bugs or problems to GetGlue is "drop a Tweet or an email and hope they get back to you". This is a weak way of doing support, because it gives the customer no feedback that they're being taken seriously. A Tweet may not get any attention - I know mine sure haven't. A letter to support may or may not get answered in a timely manner. If there were some sort of automated tracking & ticketing system in place it could at least send an auto-response e-mail to the person contacting support with an incident number. Even if the incident gets closed as a non-issue, at least there will be some kind of feedback to the customer.

11. Actually let us know when there's a bug in the system.
There have been several examples of where this would have been a good thing, but the first and most glaring of them dates back to the start of the season for Glee. That Tuesday the users were hit by a bug that disabled the awarding of stickers for the site's power users. There was no notification of it. Most of us had to e-mail support and pray for an answer,and then the word got passed around the site via messages when we'd check in and bitch about not being awarded the sticker.  Ever since then we've run into the same thing repeatedly - the awarding of stickers breaks on release day for the power users (and sometimes for everybody). The support staff could save themselves a lot of headache if they'd just post a notice that there's a bug to the Blog, Tweet it, or both. The users would be a lot less frustrated as well.

12. Another tweak to the Guru voting system: Take me to the topic's page to cast my vote.
Either that or list the current Guru and their review when someone sends out a "Vote for me!" request. Right now it stands that if someone wants to be the Guru of something they can mass-message everyone on their subscribers list. If you're a subscriber to them as well as the current guru and you don't think to check to see who the current guru is before casting your vote, this could lead to some hard feelings between friends. Showing us who the current guru is in addition to their review will actually help in the decision-making process.

13. More transparency in the Guru system.
Right now it's a complete and utter crap-shoot when it comes to figuring out why the current Guru is the Guru. All we've been told is that the Guru "is identified by a point system that rewards valuable comments and replies" and "The individual with the most points for the item is its Guru." That's fine, but how about giving us a little info as to how the scoring works? Do check-ins without a comment count towards the Guru's score? What about check-ins with a comment? How many points, if any, do these net you towards being the Guru? What about up-votes and replies? How many points do these contribute to a Guru's score? For that matter, how about showing us what the current Guru's score is in comparison to our own score? I may never be able to become the Guru of True Blood, but it'd be nice to know if I even had a snowball's chance in hell.

Ok, that's our baker's dozen for now. More wish list items in the future as they percolate out of my melon. :)

My wish-list for GetGlue's website...

A Wish-List for Tweaks to GetGlue.com


1.  The ability to re-organize or sort your sticker page.
Even if it's just sorting by Alphabetical / Chronological / Category, with ascending and descending as options, it'd be better than the fixed chronological order they have it set as now.

2.  A revamp of the Guru system
(This one is definitely going to piss off some people...)
Specifically, one where you actually have to leave a review to even get considered for the Guru position. I've seen too many people "review" an item with one line, like "I love it!", or even just one character like a period, and then they broadcast that they want to be the Guru so all their followers up-vote their review to net them the Guru position. It's lame and cheapens the site as a whole. A Guru should be someone who is genuinely interested and enthusiastic about a topic, not someone who is just playing "steal the gurus" to get the gold sticker.

3.  The ability to down-vote someone's review.
This ties in off the previous one. If they can't get it set up to require an actual review (or even if they can), they could at least give us the option to "disagree" with a review or mark it as "lame" or "weak", which would then count against the reviewer's Guru points.  Granted, people would still play the "get all my friends to vote for me" game, but it might help weed out some of the crappy reviews

4.  A discussion area for each topic.
Right now the back-and-forth replies we get under the check-ins or tied in with the replies work, but they're hard to follow and eventually will fall off the page, leaving no record of the conversation for anyone else who might stumble across the topic. If there was a dedicated discussion area on each page we could check up on new messages regarding that topic while we check-in instead of having to weed through our personal messages to see if there were any replies regarding a topic we checked-in to.

5.  The ability to directly message someone.
Again, this ties in with the above point. Sometimes you just want to shoot a quick note over to someone that isn't tied to a specific topic. Unfortunately with the way the website is currently designed, you can't; you have to wait for them to post or Like something (or hunt back through your subscription streams) and then reply to their post. That's clunky and obtrusive and doesn't fit well with a site where there is supposed to be at least a little social interaction.

6.  Last, and certainly NOT least:  A fix to all the bugs that plague new sticker releases.
Seriously.  They know there's going to be a spike in traffic on a topic as soon as they let the stickers go live. They know that those of us who play the "sticker hunter" game are going to hammer the servers like mad until we get the proper number of check-ins.  And they know we'll get frustrated when the promised reward doesn't appear. It's annoying as hell to the user to have multiple legit check-ins to an item and still not have the sticker for it.  It's even more annoying to see that happening when other people around you are earning the same sticker with no problems.  You can't tell me they seriously didn't consider the possibility that people might not use the site as intended and end up with a sticker count in the hundreds.

Ok, end of rant.  I'm out for the night.