If you were Bill and you had a bunch of free time on your hands, what features would you add to Survey Central?

I would add survey categories beyond the existing ones. New categories might include "useless trivia" or "sexually explicit questions". Yes, I know I'm a prude, but now that I've got stepdaughters, if I want to show them SC I'd like to be able to feel comfortable doing it! It would be cool to be able to select whole categories of questions and hide or unhide them if one wanted to.

check boxes for status of surveys, so if you can change the survey rating and survey state without having to reload the entire thing for each survey. Show all would show *all*, even the hidden ones. oh, I'd fix the bug where the pull down menus are black on black under netscape 3.04.

I think actually it's in really good shape now! I think Bill should take his good, close and personal friends out for Indian every night so we can sample new wines for a certain someone's wine web page ...

Can't think of anything.

I would make Survey Central integral to the computer's OS

I bet it comes as no surprise that my top one is... Threaded comments! My guess at the simplest way to do it: stick a "reply" button next to each comment, which would bring you to a place you can enter another comment. The new comment pops on the end of the list, with a link to the one it's a reply to. All comments would be presented in chronological order, and you could maybe have a "threaded" or "all" option that either presents just the top level comments and little one-line links to the replies, or all of 'em in a big list. Since you'd then have potentially multiple comments that you own, there might want to be an "edit" button next to each of your comments so you can still change them...

I think things otherwise are going really well! Yay Bill!

(as a totally personal nit, I don't particularly like the look of the site (I find the buttons way too dark and hard to read) - I'd probably redo the colors/graphics too. But that's minor)

***Bill: re: threading, I'm personally of the opinion that the current unstructured interface is harder/more frustrating to use than threading would be. But YMMV of course.
Re: setting up "push" - For IE, it's really easy to write CDF (Channel Description Format) files, and make a set of webpages into an Active Channel....that'd be pretty cool!

***Bill: Ah... I see what you mean. I just think that a) it already is a discussion site (this survey here is a great example), and b) a simple threading interface wouldn't really change anything except making these sorts of back-and-forths easier to read.

***Eris: an email gateway you can use to send mail to other users is a great idea!

A way to email individual commenters or survey creators so that "further discussion" could be "taken offline" at some point to avoid torturing others... or if one wanted to have private conversations...

As for all the trouble with picking colors of the background and widgets and so on, I sort of like how HTML started out. The choice of colors should be made at the viewing end, not at the page design end. This lets them be set appropriately for the hardware, lighting conditions, and the viewer's preferences. Same with fonts.

As for hold, I used it for a short time until you added the ability to view "all changed". Now I don't see much point to it.

A message board so I could ask the abundance of Techies here some silly questions about my computer.

I would like it if I didn't have to use HTML tags to do things like line/paragraph breaks and links. Especially links. I haven't done any hypertext in my surveys/comments because, frankly, I'm scared of screwing it up and messing up the page. But there were a few times I would have liked to use it; like the Beatles album survey...I wanted to include links to the All-Music guide for each album, but I got scared...

***I've only today realized that the line/paragraph break issue has already been addressed! Shows you what I know

***bill: I've been thinking about it, and frankly I have no idea how you'd make links easier either. In a "perfect GUI" scenario, I guess you could highlight a piece of text, get a context menu on it, select "Link", and a dialog box would pop up allowing you to enter the URL. How hellish would that be to code?!? I suppose I could go looking for it, but is the HTML for links documented in the Help section somewhere? As for the autolinking thing, I think it's cool until someone writes a sentence like "In reality, were a duck to evolve seven breathing gills on its bill, this would lead the rather gilly duck to almost certain doom." This is admittedly a very unlikely sentence.

***bill: Go with your first instinct. It's funny, and it's worth it.

***bill: Whoa! Why do I have a bunch of freaky stuff at the bottom of this page? It seems to be data about me; my login, password, the numbers of the surveys I've created, my email address, my date of birth, my comment on the Cuba survey...and now I just saved changes and it went away...weird! And now it's back again! AAAhhh! I'm scared...

Chat room! Chat room! Chat room! I'd really like to be able to discuss some of these issues in real time with some of the other excellent users.

I'd rewrite the ranked survey stuff in Java so that instead of keeping you from submitting an invalid ranking set, it would prevent you from selecting the invalid set in the first place.

Make a way to tell when someone has responded or referred to you in a completed survey. (IE instead of browsing all changed surveys, I can just list the ones where someone said "Gilly, you ignorant slut".)
Omigod - it linked my name automagically! COOL! And it got the line break! Bill, you're a god.
As to syntax for URLs, I've always been fond of the <http://www.etc.com>; convention. Do people use the angle brackets for other things? You could have it check for http or ftp or whatever inside them, perhaps.
Also, a "what's new" page documenting new features would be handy, as much fun as it is to poke around and try to figure it out.

After reading all these suggestions, I'd just like to say: Please, no frames, and as very little Java as possible? Lynx dislikes both, and it is what I use most often to access SC...

I'd put in a lot of Shockwave and Java and ActiveX controls and then cause the page to give you no content whatsoever unless your browser _precisely_ matched the setup that Bill Thought You Should Be Using. In fact, I'd cause it to crash your entire OS when you tried to load it. OH and lots of background midi sounds and animated gifs for backgrounds.
Gilly "Gilly you ignorant slut. how _did_ you get this job anyway?" :)

If I had a bunch of free time, I'd add some sort of threaded comments.
**bill: One of the other survey sites (I think OpenDebate) has the option for users to add answers, and frankly, I think it's a bad idea. What would often happen is after several people had voted, someone would add an answer. Now everyone who has already voted has to see if they should revote. Sometimes the added answers were nigh-duplicates, which is bad. Sometimes the new answers were really good and should have probably been in the survey from the start, but only half the voters ever saw that option. Usually, surveys that had been up for a while had fifteen-gazillion different answers, most of which had only one or two votes.
**lynx users: If you didn't already know, you can change the main menu settings. Change them, then go to the statistics page, then go to the main page from the link on the statistics page and your changes will stick. If any of you know of an easier way, please let me know.

I liked black better. But the new asterisks rule! You da man!! *** I used Hold. And I, too, would like a multiple-hide feature; I have been talking to Ms. Hunter a lot, as is my custom, but I don't think that has come up.

I'd remove sorting.
I'd add a general discussion board used (hopefully) to discuss things not associated with any particular survey (e.g. "Why are some people's names underlined and in a smaller typeface?"). ***(Well, now I know)

bill: For ideas on marking up text, see setext. For possibly useful Perl code for HTMLifying plain text, see txt2html.

bill: if we pass around a petition, will you bring black back? Hey, that can be our slogan...

Bill: is there any significance to the asterisks on each question? I notice some have more than others. ***Elijablue: I liked black better too, but just try saying "bring black back" three times fast.

well, since I completly lack imagination in this area, I will just pick nits... the auto-comment-direct thingy picks up random uses of words (such as doom, or possibly reality) and points you towards those user's comments. can you stick an option (or a special character) to say whether you want it to point? other than that it is a great feature.. **bill if it is too much of a pain, I can certainly live with it... or go with Daver's suggestion of *name or even name:
*bill: I generally search by all modified. for some reason, if the modified survey would have just a red asterisk (meaning one modification with a mention of reality) it doesn't show up under all modified. so I have to go and search for them by keyword. if someone else modifies after, then it shows up, but not necessarily with a red asterisk.

In no particular order:

Create a "hide surveys" screen that lets you check all the ones you want to hide (or unhide) and then click a button to implement all the changes at once (rather than "hide...wait...hide...wait...".

Indicate in the comments list whether people have hidden the survey, so you know not to respond to their comments.

Implement a "respond-to" feature in the comments list and display the corresponding comments hierarchically, such that you can follow a dialog. Alternatively, provide a link to a web-accessible newsy sort of forum and encourage people to take dialogs there.

Allow multiple columns of answers.

***bill -- yes I have; in fact, she suggested the idea long before I ever looked at SC and it stuck in my head. And it's true. Particularly for new folks (like me!) who try to wade through Nhundred old surveys quickly.

***bill -- hooray for the red asterisks and the tiny names for hidden people! Now a followup: more sort/show options. In particular, what I'd like to do is show this month's modified plus all surveys (hidden or not) where a comment is addressed to me. Nitpicky, I know.

Hey!!! How about if you create a chat room...kinda like a barn....and we could all get together and put on a play!!!

or.....maybe you could have a room where you could run a topic each day. People who wanted to go in and discuss it could rather than trying to respond to comments within their responses. It could get interesting if the topic were controversial enough. Of course then we'd have to hire a cop......

(not a big deal thing..just a place to hang and further discuss the topics. DO NOT DO AWAY WITH SC AS IT IS!!!)

fnord???????

**bill....what happened to the stars in the already viewed surveys?
seeing thos little guys lined up was as good as hearing "you've got mail". Now I have to check each survey to see of there are any new responses. I really hate taking the time to pull it up just to get that "no new messages on server" feeling (sniff).

emily, those stars will be back again someday. ...but, for now - they were just too much of a performance problem. I hope to be converted over to a fast database in a month and at that point I'll probably bring them back.

I'm constantly amazed at the improvements! I like the feedback option that shows up now. I'm so far behind on reading the surveys I don't have any time to be innovative!

Who is Bill?

I don't know enough about the site or its inner workings to comment. It would be better to leave such things to those who actually know what they're doing.