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Although these here forums have been a fixture of the site for almost a decade, the Feature Wishing Well is a little less than seven years old. So, in commemoration the FWW's seven year anniversary, I'm going to clean it out in seven days' time. And I mean clean it out. Everything. The bathwater and the baby.

One week from today, I'm going to mass reject every single "New" (i.e. unaccepted) feature. Every accepted feature will be demoted to New. After that, every feature in the New tab will go through strict scrutiny:

1. Does it clearly state who it will benefit (readers, new members, authors, power users, etc.) and how it will benefit them?
2. Does it thoroughly describe the mechanism in which it will work? I.e. how it would appear to a user, if it could "leverage" an existing feature (like, the notifications)
3. How difficult will this be to implement?
4. How important is this to implement relative to all the other things that can be done?
5. Has this already been requested? If so, how is it different (if it's new) or why should it be reconsidered (if it's rejected)?
6. Does the community think that it's a worthy idea?

If and only if these tests are passed will the feature request make its way to the hallowed "Accepted" tab. It's also worth mentioning that these are for features, not design tweaks (like how I just updated the forums). The site will be getting a facelift (better looks, more accessible, more mobile-friendly, etc), but none of those are features; so, don't get offended if it's rejected on those grounds.

So what does mean to you, the faithful CYS member, and why should you care about spending your time tossing an idea down the feature wishing well? Good question!

1. You get to help decide the fate of the site, and where it will go in the near feature.
2. You get to earn a bunch of Experience Points and the prestige of being awarded points from feature requests. Those haven't been given out for quite some time.

Also, this is a rare opportunity to plagiarize pay homage to other people's ideas and get their credit for it. There are a crapton of great ideas in the New tab right now (almost ~200), so if you'd like to help out, please spend some time going through them and get ready to re-post them (ideally, linking to the original thread) once the Feature Wishing Well is emptied.

Oh, and one last thing... please don't post more than five ideas at a time. There's only one programmer, and he doesn't have a good record of implementing things as of late; too many features will scare him off.

Questions? Clarifications? Comments? Share them here...

So if we have been told off handedly that our idea was accepted (i.e my extra forums page) do we need to repost?

Unless it gets in before the cut-off, yes...but I suspect this will be the only one that gets done before then. All it needs is good name, a description, and some ground rules before it gets accepted, though.

Will these criteria be a required format for all new posts? For example:

Idea: There should be a button similar to the Random button that only selects a random storygame from the list of storygames you have not rated.

1. Who will it benefit and how? All members will benefit from this. As it stands, when you click on the random button it often comes up with a story you've already played. This idea would make this process less infuriating.

2. How will it appear to the user? It would be a sub-button to Storygames on the sidebar, similar to the Random and Search buttons. Alternatively, whenever you click Random there could be a tick box at the top of the storygame page you land on that says "Only show unrated storygames:".

3. How difficult will this be to implement? It shouldn't be too difficult, it's just a matter of changing the coding behind the Random button.

4. How important is this? It's not extremely important but it's an easy feature to implement.

5. How is this different to previous feature requests? It has not been requested before.

And then the 6th criterion would be determined by the community response to the post.

No, the format definitely doesn't need to be so rigid... in fact, it probably shouldn't be, especially when some things are so obvious. It just makes it harder to read this way, at least to me. These are just the questions that I will be asking when evaluating these ideas.

Like, I think this example idea (random unread) is pretty obvious who it would benefit. Most of the time it will be obvious, and if not, it's a valid question to ask.

Other parts (how difficult it would) are speculative -- even for me. I may have to dig through to code to see if it's a cinch or a bear.

I'm not going to immediately reject a thought-out request just b/c I don't see these -- that's why there's a forum and public discussion -- but if someone spends 8 seconds to write "be soo kwwol if i cud doonload storygames to my xbox", it's just going to be rejected.

Glad to hear it, that format was a hassle to type out.

I'm a little sad, yet a little happy.  Now we don't have to have random questions!

And the well has been cleaned out

*Applause*