Most important features (or improvements) (new thread)

I made a thread like this a long long time ago so it's time for another one!

What do you think this site is missing the most that would make it more popular/widely used?

The original thread is here and a lot has changed since then :

www.listal.com/groups/viewthread/378/

At the moment I am concentrating on site usability (the new homepage for example I hope will help new members)

The 'Other' tab.

For Magazines, Dream Cars, Clothes, and other stuff!

The ability to edit our profile pages is going in the right direction as users tend to like customizable things, but as someone in another thread mentioned, it can go too far like those horribly designed pages in myspace that crash browsers, so there has to be a limit, but also some choice too.

Maybe a new type of widget for us to embed on other websites would be cool too, different designs, etc, the one at the moment is a bit too big for my liking. Or maybe just the Listal logo as a link, something like that.

I would also like it if we could search for an author in our own collection, or director, or artist, as opposed to being restricted to the title of their works. Sometimes I cant remember the title of a book, for example, and type in the name of the author but I get no results, etc.

And lastly, its hard finding a certain product lost amid a search result of hundreds, so searching for ASIN numbers, ISBN numbers, etc, would be handy.

Question: What do you have to do to have a product be in the 'used' category? I dont quite get it, all my items are either owned or wanted, rated or not rated, I dont know what the 'Used' category is for...

Keep up the good work Tom.

In movies section, this is what's missing:

-ability to search for actors/directors; this is handy, because if you wanted to add movies from John Candy to your database, for example, you'd have first find one movie he was in, and then click on his name

-for foreign films, sometimes the foreign names is used, sometimes the International English title - this makes it confusing to find the film

example: www.listal.com/viewproduct/movies/25503
This is a czech movie called Horem Padem. I can never remember its translated title ('Up and Down', which isnt even close to the translation - Horem Padem is a czech saying, something loosely translated 'falling off mountain' or 'mountain falling'). Anyways, both me and my dad always forget this movie is in our lists, coz we dont refer to it as 'up & down'. Suggestion: maybe have original name, and then Internation English title in brackets?

- actors/cast list should be revamped/truncated, and maybe add a 'star' icon that allows users to give a particular actor a 'bonus' for his/her performance, and the ones with most stars for that particular movie gets lists first in the cast list? So even if IMDB lists a cast alphabetically, we can choose all 'stars' of the movie, and those would get listed first. See, anybody can give cast lists just like IMDB, but if you make Listal's cast list BETTER than imdb, thanks to user participation, thats a big bonus for getting more notice from new users.

- add user-added plot outlines of movies

- maybe split up comments/reviews into comments section, and reviews (and rate those reviews, and highest rated get listed first). comments would be just for quick comments, like 'this movie rocked!' or 'what a laugh-fest!', etc...

- and finally, MAJOR TAG OVERHAUL ;) most importantly, more easy to use, auto-complete, auto-suggest, truncated tag box if it gets too big by hidinig all the tags with just addition, etc...

I love where this site is headed, keep up the great work, Tom.

p.s. nearly forgot - something major is missing for movies section that everyone else seems to have - TRAILERS. Maybe allow users to send in links to trailers, and specify player needed to view it. Sure, it may take us to outside source, but i think its integral part, especially for new/upcoming movies.

I don't know if I agree with clothes and dream cars (:P) but magazines would certainly be welcomed by me in the area of new item categories. I'm not talking specific issues, but more just what magazines we read on a regular basis, or used to.

Also, another good reason for being able to search profiles via author/artist/director is when visiting someone's profile, you wonder if they've seen any of Takashi Miike's films, but you cant remember the names of them all or how to spell them and are too lazy to Google.

Yes, yes.

I definitely agree with Cihan that the sub-categories are confusing. I would rather classify books as Read/Unread, beause I don't think it makes a difference if I own the book or if I read it in school or something. And the way it's set up now looks like I own 32 books but have read only 21 books- really, I have read all 53 of them, but only own a few. I don't see the need to have these in two separate sections. The same goes for videogames- Played/Unplayed is all I think is necessary.

And just let me reiterate my other suggestion, that TV shows have "seasonal" subcategories that can be rated separately. I think this would be a great feature.

Thanks for continuing to grow and change with all of our input- this is a fantastic project and a wonderful website.

- maybe split up comments/reviews into comments section, and reviews (and rate those reviews, and highest rated get listed first). comments would be just for quick comments, like 'this movie rocked!' or 'what a laugh-fest!', etc...

I can do this automatically and add an option for only showing long reviews, though at the moment the total number of reviews is very small anyway. I will be adding a rating feature very soon.

To me the only major thing missing is the ability is the ability to sort DVDs in the order that we want it. I like this site but it would improve exponentially once that happens! I'm not talking about the custom sort filters. I have way too many DVDs for that feature to be useful for me. Would it be possible to add an option to add a sort title like DVDAF does?

How so you sort in DVDAF? I can't see an option to do that.

If you're logged in at the top left corner you can go to My DVDs and there's a drop down menu that says "Edit my titles." I knew box comes up and there's an option to sort all movies under a sort title.

Most important feature?

Get those darn accents working again! ;)

they were working 100% perfect a few weeks ago, and now this:
www.listal.com/viewproduct/movies/40069

pretty much every czech accented letter is butchered. do a mouse-over and in the Status bar of firefox, it displays correctly, but in listal, its fuggered beyond belief. my dad's entire czech DVD collection is unreadable right now.

i know getting character sets is a pain coz of microsoft, but you had it perfectly fixed around christmas. what happened?

Unfortunately they were never properly fixed, I have been working on full true support for all special characters this week but still have to fix some of the existing data.

ah, forget all other languages. just make sure english, french, and czech work, and i'd be happy. :)

all kidding aside, yeah, so many languages, so many character sets. good luck fixing it. i think it's a top priority, and would open up floodgate of new non-english users to listal which would help spread the word and make this website very popular.

What I would like to see the most is a connection between Movies & TV and the DVDs, such as adding an "Owned" option to movies and tv listings.

Id love to be able to print-out my "listal" list..with all the info included: DVD cover - Title (ofcorse) - Director - Main Actors - Etc etc
Any suggestions

they were working 100% perfect a few weeks ago, and now this:www.listal.com/viewproduct/movies/40069

Well that example is working now but are there any others?

skimmed thru about a dozen czech films, and all titles and actors/actresses accents are correct. thanks, tom.

I know I've mentioned it before but is there anything planned with a personalized sort feature or at least a way to remove with words like the, a, an, etc.?

bump