I stopped incrementally updating the Zone because most of the new stuff is irrelevant (courseware for the U), so it’d be wasted effort. But on my list is a comment upgrade to make them effectively equal to posts, title and all, with a WYSIWYG editor to ease your pain, both for new comments and for editing them. Comment editing will no longer go through the dashboard, and you’ll no longer have to do that contortion with comment titles. That upgrade is the milestone that will trigger an upgrade to the Zone installation.

In general I plan to close off the dashboard to all but system admins, with restricted access to some areas for moderators. I’m moving the features that normal users need out of the backroom and embedding them into the front end, where I can design friendlier and easier interfaces than WP’s. The dashboard is an abomination in UI terms.

Another feature milestone you can expect to see on the Zone is post ratings. In planning for the upcoming MOOC, we face the challenge of dealing with posts by tens of thousands of students, and needed a mechanism both for peer review, and to promote the best posts upwards in the hierarchy, with the best-of-the-best appearing on the front page. We’re going with “crowd sourcing”, and the ratings plus a filter algorithm should make it all work. Here at the Zone, I’m thinking of creating a real front page, instead of our current static driveway, where you can see the highest-rated posts from across the entire site.

Also, the Zone would, of course, use a completely different rating system. I’m not interested in some blunt-instrument “popularity” rating; in the case of professional-development courseware, I’m interested in things like correctness and original thinking. So, I’m looking at multi-factor ratings something like a Myers-Brigg personality index–the “personality” of a post, in a way.

Ratings can be bipolar or unipolar in nature. One that the Zone will definitely have is unipolar: politically partisan; and I’ll set up the filter algorithm so that the larger that metric, the less likely a post is to show up on the front page.

When I said I intended to tone down the politics on the Zone, I wasn’t kidding. Asking nicely hasn’t worked, so now I redesign the environment to actively discourage it.