Please make usernames case-insensitive on login. My iPhone auto cases my username as AlanH upon which event I get a
"Bad Login" message. I believe most users expect usernames to be case insensitive.
Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#562> HN should put a little entrepreneur badge next to your name for having shipped a product. That would motivate some people.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1917605
To encourage HN users to ship code, allow them to display an icon next to their user name once they have shipped their project. This would work on the honor system. To make the implementation simple, users can self-manage the icon. Perhaps a "ship" icon could be displayed that linked to the product if applicable.
This will help create a culture of "shipping" through a shame/pride/credibility/game achievement effect, as well as help users keep the HN addiction in check.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#563Users often say "My email is in my profile" since they assume the email field in their profile is visible by others. I would make the labels more specific as to what is public/hidden.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#564Please delay the disappearance of the upvote arrow until the upvote has been received and acknowledged by the HN server. The up-arrow could stay as-is until the upvote has finished sending, or could be dimmed.
Background:
When one upvotes a comment or submission, the up-arrow disappears right away, but there is a bit of network lag before the upvote is actually sent to the server. On some networks, this lag can be significant. Lag on my network has caused me to sometimes upvote an item, close the window immediately, come back later, and then realize that the upvote wasn’t counted. This is more of a problem for submissions, where not only does the submitter not get credit, but the submission also fails to get added to my Saved Links page.
The only way to check whether an upvote has been received is to refresh the page, but that also has the effect of canceling any upvotes-in-progress that have not finished, and requires one to remember which item you upvoted.
My current workaround, after I upvote something, is to leave the tab open, view other pages for a while, and close the tab when I come back to it later. However, this has the disadvantage of me having to remember, when I return to a tab, whether I left it open because there was still something to read on it or simply because I was waiting for an upvote to finish.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#565Show a “saved comments” link in my profile, underneath the “saved stories” link. This would show all comments that I upvoted, similar to “saved stories”.
Sometimes I read a really good comment and would like to save it to read again later, but there is no site function to do that. There is already a Saved Links page, so expecting me to bookmark every page I like can’t be a reason to not include this feature.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#566Allow users to add tags to posts. Make it possible to restrict the posts on the frontpage (when logged in) to a list of tags.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#567I'd like to be able to change my name.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#568A list- on the right side of the page- with the 10 most popular words discussed on HN the last day.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#569When you upvote a comment, if you have authored any parent comment in the the thread, your nick should be listed in the comment metadata ("Upvoted by commenters: tqbf, RiderOfGiraffes").
Upvotes/downvotes send conversational signals that incite responses, whether those responses have intrinsic value or not. So do critiques. Seeing the name of someone who just critiqued your comment in a list of your upvoters might neutralize some pointless flame wars.
To an extent, we already have this feature informally, because "I upvoted you, but..." has become an idiom on HN. I think it'd work better if it was automatic though, and it might incentivize "feel-good" upvotes.
Re: Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
#570My avg score hasn't changed in about 2 months, it's exactly at 2.17 and has always been. I'm curious, because I read how this score is calculated and it's supposedly the average of the person's last comments - only in my case it can't be. Other people don't seem to have this "problem", does that mean my account is flagged somehow? Or is it in truth the average of only the first comments when an account is fresh and then stays the same forever?