- Implement some sort of language filtering. Although I have nothing against the use of non-English and think it's actually commendable than MS allowing it, I would rather filter out Gadgets that are of no use to me. Alternatively allow multiple languages in the Gadget description, or some form of language translation.
- Improve Gadget images. It would be great if you could attach screenshots, as well as the 100x100 icon.
- Do something about Gadget spam. "Vamos Strip Player" springs to mind, I'd hate to think how many times it's posted.
- Remove the 1000 character limit on the description field, and allow it to be rich text
- Allow additional files to be posted, such as readme's or FAQ'
OT: Suggestions about gallery.live.com
Several things stand out about this site, now that people are starting to use it. So, here's some suggestions:
OT: Suggestions about gallery.live.com
ShimonSim
- A lot of "reviews" are people raising issues. Perhaps there should be a discussion section as well as a reviews section. To allow the author/users to communicate.
- For the amount of downloads, suprising few people rate the Gadgets after they've tried them. eBay found a good way around this by making it a task to review, I'm sure MS can think of something to get people to give feedback.
- Some of the Gadgets don't have images. As MS are authorizing them, I would have thought you'd check the image is okay, and something to do with the Gadget (eg. Multi Meter (Dual Core_ NEW!), Network Activity, 3D Picture Orb)
- Some Gadgets don't have icons in Sidebar (eg. 3D Picture Orb)
- The Start Menu (or whatever you call it) keeps appearing on screen for no reason, occasionally when moving the mouse outside of the browser window.
- In the reviews section, the section that holds the reviews name/picture isn't wide enough, most names are truncated and on non-IE browsers you get a scrollbar.
- When navigating back from a Gadget to the Gadget list view, the Sort order resets to "Sort by Rating"
- I counted around 16 non-English Gadgets classified as English (eg. every Gadget posted by jusuiitta)
- When changing the view (Text/Text with Thumbnail/Thumbail) you sometimes get an error "Sorry, we don't have anything here for 'All categories'"
On point 8, as previously raised. If a Gadget is multi-language, the description should reflect that. We need a way to enter a descriptions for every language the Gadget supports.Wellman
If suggestion #4 is being implemented, then here's suggestion #8:
Mainly because once you implement #4, you'll be overrun with people editing their descriptions but also because once you've authorised a gadget, it's highly unlikely that the author will add any spam or otherwise to the descriptions and if they did, they'd be reported quickly enough.
Waiting the several days it can sometimes take to re-approve after making a minor change is rather annoying!
Andy
PS Chris: Why not make the post sticky (always at the top), if you want everyone to post suggestions here
xbrady
Further more, I've changed my nickname (ei99070) in my profile, but the nickname on the gallery remains the old (WebMasterPT) one... can you please update it or tell me how to do it
Best regards, Pedro Lamas
Arkcann
Chris, the suggestion on #4 is one I've mentioned to you a few times -- minimum bar is to allow actual line breaks. Next would be basic formatting (bold, italics) and linking, and after that maybe lists and other layout options. Personally I can live with 1000 characters, but it gets really annoying not to have line breaks. Specifically, I like to credit sources in my gadget descriptions or add a note about what's new in the latest version, and that all runs together with the generic description. For example, this is the description from my Xbox Voice gadget:
And here's how I would've preferred it to look.
I think you would agree that the latter is much more readable just with the ability to logically separate portions of the description. Links are a plus but not absolutely required.
Ron Luebke
I laughed when I saw Bruce's review of Media Player. He couldn't believe it was two-stars. Neither can I, but if people don't rate Gadgets in large numbers, it will be the few abusers that get to the top of the ratings because of the average over such a few ratings.
I'd say, either remove star ratings completely, or keep track of Gadgets people have downloaded and prompt them to rate them when they go back to the site.
Another thing that needs fixing is allowing users to rate their own Gadgets. I've seen a few that get posted, have no downloads, but have a 5 rating! Even MS are guilty of that one.
wirebarbed
Hi Jonathan and Andy.
These are all great suggestions.
We are going to be getting to some quicker than others, but they will all be reviewed by the team.
For #4, what type of information or rich text that you would ideally put there
Everyone, please feel free to post any other thoughts or suggestions you have to this thread.
Thanks!
enric vives
Hi Todd.
Yes, you have given me this feedback. We are looking into when we can do this and not "if".
Everyone else (and Todd), more feedback
Thanks!
Chintan Vyas
Ray Z. Yang
I like the rich text idea on the description, and even more so the language filtering. Maybe it would be a good idea to do a suggestions post for the actual sidebar, Jonathan
Andy
mistys77
More on #2: Few people rate the gadgets compared to download numbers (for example, 161 ratings for 44,420 downloads, or 410 ratings for 128,443 downloads), and most ratings are absurdly low. Live Clock, arguably the Best. Gadget. Evar. is only rated at 3 stars. Of my own gadgets, not a single one has a rating over 2.5 stars. While I will freely admit that several of my gadgets suck pretty bad, not all of them do.
The thing is, I'm not sure if I've pissed off somebody who's slamming down all my gadgets, if that's happening for every gadget, or if people are just rating too harshly. Here's an interesting anecdote: When I uploaded my most recent gadget, it was rated at 5 stars for a bit (first rating), then dropped down to 3 stars, and slowly slid down to 2 stars from there. While the gadget isn't a technical marvel, it's a decent little game of Tic-Tac-Toe and should be deserving of at least a 2.5-3 star rating. Since ratings are done by Passport account, and since this gadget had so few ratings I could actually see changes for each new rating, I went ahead tried a little test. I have a second Passport account that I use, so I logged into that and rated Tic-Tac-Toe at 5 stars. That bumped the gadget up to 3 stars, which was enough to make it to the top of the "Top Rated" list on the Gadget main page. Almost immediately after that, the gadget got two new ratings and dropped back down to 2 stars. Thinking that was just a fluke, I went and created two new Passport accounts (more ratings on the gadget means more ratings are necessary to change the star level), logged into each and rated the gadget at 5 stars. Once again, that bumped the gadget up to 3 stars and the top of the Top Rated list. And you know what happened next The gadget immediately got 3-4 more ratings, bringing it right back down to 2-stars. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe I've pissed somebody off. More likely, somebody's trying to protect some position on the Top Rated list and spamming down-ratings if/when some other gadget ends up at the top. Why would I come to that conclusion Because the Tic-Tac-Toe gadget has not received any more ratings since that spamming back down to 2 stars, even though it's increased by several hundred downloads. I don't think it's coincidence that several ratings would all come in a ~5 minute period and then none for a week or more.
I've mentioned rating concerns to Chris Butler in the past, so this is definitely on their radar. Whether it's fixable, I don't know. As it is right now, if you want to have a good rating for your gadget then you're going to have to engage in an arms race. Sadly, doing so is not all that difficult. While Passport has a captcha in place to prevent spamming account creation, that's not too difficult to bypass if you're willing to spend an hour or two solving captchas. Once you have a bunch of Passport accounts, you just have to cycle through each and rate each gadget you're interested in affecting (either boosting or slamming). It hasn't gotten to the point where I've written the scripts to automate such a process, and I won't help anybody else do so either. I'm just pointing out what's possible.
reyzzerolee
I doubt most Vista users will be insterested in seeing Web Gadgets, as they can't be used on Sidebar.
I see language filtering is now implemented, but again it needs to be moved to the main gadget page.
With regard to point 4, if you look at my Media Player gadget, you'll see the description looks a mess. It certainly didn't look like that when I created it - it at least had line breaks in it. Ideally I'd like it to have the same sort of ability as this forum, ie Indents, Bold, Italic, Underline, Font Size, Font Colour, Lists etc. ie make it HTML, not just plain text.
CPedersen
Quote from nada2surf:
Not so, when you click on 'Get More Gadgets Online', only sidebar gadgets are returned (and the page looks different to the normal gallery page, dunno if it's supposed to be like that)
Andy
Dejan Kocijasevic
Much agreed on #9. I think the majority of the users will be looking for one particular type of gadget (live, or sidebar). I imagine some confusion when a new Vista user opens sidebar and goes to 'Get More Gadgets Online' and finds half of the gadgets will not work with sidebar.
ivanchain