Building a better Ebaums
I wanted to share some of my ideas for making eBaumsWorld more user friendly and current. I love eBaums world, I am a very loyal user, I love the way eBaums gives back to the users. The following ideas and solutions are mostly simple, and I think that if implemented would make this already great site even better. Remember, eBaumsWorld is Media for the masses!!
More Content, More Often
My Friend Portolet had some great ideas for eBaums as well, one of the ideas I believe we both share is to feature more content on the main page. I live on the west cost, when I get home from work all the daily featured content has been selected and posted. While it is nice to see all the media at once, I would love to see fresh media pop up throughout the night. I am sure that other users in my timezone and across the globe woulds spend more time on eBaums looking for new features if they were scheduled 24/7. I think the best format would be a double column updated on the hour. Keep it Fresh for us insomniac freaks!
Variety is The Spice of eBaums!
I would love to see more joke featured, and more single pictures. Another thing I would love to see is an integration of the News and Links section. Choose interesting articles, and feature them on the main page, or feature a teaser of the content with a link to the source if permission is an issue. Link to known political and new blogs, and I am sure the content owners would reciprocate, its a new world out there.
There is a lot of interesting media on this site, feature more gallerys of interesting pictures, and at least one joke a day. Everyone loves telling new jokes. Tap into user opinions by featuring wacky news stories and political misdeeds daily. There are a lot of opinionated users here, let us rage!
Whoops! I did it again!
I accidentally delete media from time to time, usually blogs... Instead of having a button that delete media without a warning message, have a check box for deleting media.
Spam and Reposts, a resource wasting problem
At any given time, there are multiple copies of the same media. This creates animosity among the uploaders, and wastes major server space. Change to flag media button to a multiple choice menu. Allow Flag for Duplicate media, Spam and Porn/Gore. This would help cut down on the crap that is posted every day, saving costly server space and cluttering the site. This would also help self moderate the community here, and cut down on the butt-hurt from people not getting media featured when they uploaded the item first. We all invariably post a duplicate, I always check before I upload something, but duplicate still happen, due to many causes. In the last year, there have been almost 100,000 uploads, I would estimate that only 20% or less of these uploads are unique. Every thing else is just a repost of a repost. Server space is very expensive, volunteer moderators are not....
We need more moderators!
I think that the current moderators do a great job taking care of the main page and forum, but off-peak hours can be no-mans land around here. Having more moderators with the ability to suspends or delete media, and comment ban disruptive users would help keep this place a little more SFW and friendly. Whether the moderator be paid or volunteers I am sure you would find no shortage of great people that use this site of a regular basis. There is constantly a lot of junk posted in the blog section as well, cleaning that section up would help shine light on the great content that is posted by our talented bloggers.
I really miss fan of the month and reading about eBaums pretend family. I remember reading those posting and cracking up every time.
Bring Back Caption Contents!
They have always been very entertaining, and provide an contest for the users without photoshop skills.
Have more Treasure hunts!
I am sure that your would love to sponsor treasure hunts, in exchange for ad space, Having a monthly treasure hunt would bring in extra traffic, and would boost page views and time spent on eBaumsWorld. You could always give out eReps and Swag packs as well.
Make the digg button bigger.
Most people do not know we have a digg button, if you make it more visible on the site I guarantee that it will bring in more traffic! Lets kick some break ass. (I hate break)
Feature User Profiles.
Have a section for featuring one lucky users profile a month. This would make users try harder to upload top quality martial, and original content. You could also allow featured users to be guest editors and select media to be featured.
Feature more user content.
We all want a bigger piece of the pie, reward the users with more features. I am sure your lawyers could find away to write off the extra money spent.
Top rated section woes!
Every time a video makes it to the top rated section it is taken down after a few minuets by someone clicking less than a 5 star rating. The videos in that section typically only have 4-7 total 5 star ratings.
Get rid of that section, and replace it with a hot right now section, this section could contain the chosen by rating and overall quality, as well as view counts. Make it a section that showcases the media that really deserves it, like a junior feature section, built on reputation and quality. The old EMUSE top video tab was a great way for media to circulate, perhaps a recode of that system will a fall off point would help shine light on some great overlooked media. (but not to the blanknot factor)
Hall of fame
Allow videos to be sorted by views, and have a hall of fame for the users with the most subscriptions, and a eRep Hall of fame. We all have worked hard to upload great quality, and spent long hours on this site. Showcase the users that have made it, and rightfully earned our points. This will encourage people to upload and spend time here to get on the leader boards.
Increase the character limit for jokes.
1000 characters for a joke is rather small, update that to a capped 10k for those really long but funny jokes. Then people will leave the blog section for blogs.
Enable Multimedia Gallerys
I would love to be able to upload a top ten video list, I have tried it on the blog section, but the code gets messed up and it ends up looking like hell. If you could enable the blogs to accept video embedding. I want to make high quality gallerys, and like to join related media. Check this one out for an example of what I am talking about (that is also the digg button that I think should be on all pages.)
Have a real eBaums user gallery
Feature a gallery of pictures of the users her holding signs with their avatars printed on them or screen names. This place is becoming more and more of a community every day. Every that wants to should upload a picture and tag it “realebaumsuser” and the staff should feature it. Then we all make fun of the guys and ask the girls to show us their tits. But we will have fun doing it!
These are just some of the things I would change if I was in charge, I think that these idea will help with the over all esthetics of the layout here, and increase traffic. eBaumsWorld was kicking ass before all the other sites, and still kicks ass today. I just want to see eBaumsWorld take back its rightful place.
There is no other user generated site online that rewards it members the way eBaums does. And the users here are among the most devoted of any site I know. I have been here at least 6 years, if not more, and I know that is relativity common for the fans of eBaums.
I am a longwinded lorddread, and I love eBaums.
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