I've been on this site for well over a year now and have enjoyed being a member. With the news that there are changes on the horizon, I wanted to share some ideas that I've had for a while on how to improve CBM.com. I know nothing about web design and how difficult some of these things would be to implement. These things are just features that I think would improve the overall experience of the site.
Reply System:
As someone who contributes to both sites, I really think that there's a lot that CBM can take from Youtube here. I would really like to be notified whenever someone comments on one of my articles. I also would like to be able to reply directly to other people's comments and have those people receive some form of notification when one of their comments receives a reply. It would also make things easier to have an option that displayed the newest comments first instead of having to click to the last page of comments to see what is currently being talked about. By the way, I would really like to be able to edit my comments again.
Review System:
I think it would be very cool if people started to say, "I wonder what comic book fans think of this movie?" and came to this site to check reviews. We could be like a secondary Rotten Tomatoes! When someone decides to submit a review, they'd have the option of rating it with the site's official rating system and having it average in to the movie's CBM Review Score. The rating system could work in a variety of ways: 5 star, 1-10 scale (with decimals), 1-100 scale etc. I think this could really add a cool dimension to writing reviews and give people another reason to visit the site.
News Groups:
I enjoy being able to click on a symbol at the top left of the main page and see all the articles related to a character. I think this could be improved by adding more divisions within the character pages. It would be nice to see News, Features, Editorials, Interviews, Fan Fic, and Reviews all separated into individual sections for characters, making specific things easier to find. In particular, I think it would be very helpful in the organization of Fan Fic given the fact that people are probably more likely to look for old fan fiction than news, features, or reviews.
Member Interaction:
When we click on a member's name on that member's article, we're directed to that member's profile page with all their useful information. It would be helpful if we could click on a member's name next to their comments in the comments section and be taken to their profile. I don't know anyone on this site very well, but other people seem to know each other. For this reason, I think some kind of friend system could be a nice addition. I don't want to turn the site into a social network, but some little features such as being notified when friends are on chat or have posted an article would be cool. Maybe the ability to send personal messages (non-email) that would be received with other notifications would be useful too.
My CBM:
IGN has this thing called My IGN that allows users to have their own personal news feeds of things that interest them. I believe this concept could be applied very successfully here. Say you only care about The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. You could have a tab that only gives you updates on Batman and The Avengers. A person's selected interests could also appear on their profile page. You could also choose to follow certain members if you really like someone's fan fiction or editorials. Each one of their articles would appear in your My CBM tab along with the updates from the franchises you've chosen. I believe this feature would be an incentive for non-members who visit the site regularly to join because it would facilitate the experience by making it easier for them to find exactly what they're looking for.
Thanks for reading! I hope some of my suggestions are taken into consideration. If any other memebers like my ideas or have something they'd like to add, please voice your opinion in the comments section. Clicking the like button would also be greatly appreciated.