Walkthrough and install counts
Two of the major problems that I feel userstyles.org has are:
a) It’s not obvious what exactly user styles are and what someone’s supposed to do with them. For those familiar with userContent/Chrome.css or Greasemonkey, it’s a simple concept. For those familiar with stylesheets in general, it’s a small leap. But for those non-technical people, it requires a bit of hand-holding. To help fix this problem, I’ve greatly expanded the text on the main page to include a walkthrough of what userstyles and Stylish are all about.
b) There aren’t enough styles. I credit this to the fact that there’s not enough feedback for style authors. Sure, people can rate their styles, but the number of ratings and comments has been disappointingly low, probably due to the fact that you have to log in to rate and every time you close your browser, you log out. Unfortunately, persistent cookies seem like something difficult to do in Ruby on Rails. So I needed some sort of way to leave feedback that wouldn’t require the user to be logged in, but also wouldn’t be open to spam or crap posting. I’ve implemented install counters for styles. This will keep track of the number of installs a style has had per week and in total. Yes, it’s also abusable (Install a style, delete it, install it again, etc.) but the only people who would care about upping the count would be the authors themselves, and they’re generally smart enough not to do it. Once I get a few days’ data, I’ll make a “Most Popular” count on the main page.
What else do you think userstyles needs? Keep in mind, I’m looking mostly for problems (e.g. hard to find styles). I’ve found that many people (at my real job and relating to userstyles/Stylish) propose a solution rather than highlight a problem. For example, “let’s make text X red a big” is a solution, but probably isn’t the best solution to “it’s hard to find text X”.
May 30th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
One thing I find irritating about the layout of the site is that there is no way to order the styles by last updated or last added
I know there are 5 of each listed on the front page but If one doesn’t visit for a couple of days or so it is virtually impossible to tell what’s new
Also the RSS feeds are not working properly (at least in netvibes) - they update with random styles irrepective of when they were added or updated
Prob not the technical type of response you were looking for eh ?
May 30th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
There’s a longer list of updated and new styles if you click on the headings.
I know there’s a problem with the feeds. I’m pretty sure it’s showing the correct styles, it’s just showing them in the wrong order.
June 26th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Here’s a couple ideas:
1. on a users page, show the number of installs in the list of styles for that user. It’s a bit painful clicking thought styles to see how they’re doing. As well, “install” is really only half the equation. For those more dynamic styles like filtersetP, the number of updates should be counted somehow as well.
Not sure how feasible this would be, but more stats on a user and style page would be great as well… not only last updated, but creation date, number of edits (to name a few) would really be interesting.
2. in addition to obsolete/unobsolete, how about private/public. Let a registered user select if a style should be made public or not. This gives the advantage of storing small customizations to other people’s styles, as well as a place to store partial “in-progress” styles away from that user’s main system.
June 27th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
One more for you….
encouraging comments and ratings has a small downside, the list of comments on a user’s page gets pretty long. At some point, comments for obsolete styles should be removed. How about hiding other’s comments for a user’s obsolete styles, and somehow highlighting that their own comments are for other’s obsolete styles?
Sorry if that’s massively confusing. but I believe some kind of moderation is needed. There’s currently a potential for a user to have only a negative comment and rating for an obsolete style while having a replacement style that has been installed many times.
One more, since I’m on a rant now… The rating system itself is somewhat dubious, since the community in general is kind and generous. There’s little difference perceived between 0, 1, 2, and 3, which are negative (and very rare). 4 is mainly “close, basically works” or the like, with 5 being a solid pat on the back.
July 7th, 2006 at 8:40 am
One great addition would be tags, “a la” userscripts.org but better (i.e. allowing tag combination for faster search).
This is something I’ve implemented quite a lot of times, so I offer my help if you’re interested.