Discussions and Longer Blogs

Suppose it was, "Please share your views on capital punishment".

@Marty1 I always avoid those about embarrassing topics. People have different ideas about capital punishment. Some can become very aggressive if you say that you are pro, others are aggressive if you say that life must be respected. It's better to stay out from some discussions.

@Marty1 I do not know why some topics make people aggressive.

very much my position too. If it holds my attention, it can be as long as it likes

I think very long posts get fewer readers but we should still write what we like and feel. If mylot realize there is a need for it they could / should make provision for longer and more detailed posts.

'Tasks' are not, I think, what @arthurchappell is meaning, quite. However, another feature of the old MyLot was the ability to link one's blog, using an RSS feed, which people could then comment on (and earn something for commenting). I think, perhaps, that is more what he had in mind. The 'tasks' feature did give people the opportunity to write articles but they had to be on a specific topic, set by the Task Owner. The best were those set by @SharonBucks (who, I believe, was a staff member) from Sept 2011 to shortly before the redesign of the site, but there were other tasks which could be set by any member of MyLot. Unfortunately, many of them were inconsequential and only worth a few cents and the feature was open to considerable abuse and, I think, took quite a bit of moderation and account administration behind the scenes. I doubt whether the current staff could contemplate setting that up again at present!

@owlwings That does sound like what I have in mind. It's a shame it was abused badly. I wasn't on Mylot then or its a part of it would have undoubtedly been active with.

@owlwings I have written several articles for the task owners specially SharonBucks who paid the most. There were so many of them. The concept of 'early bird catches the worm' worked there in that whoever grabbed that task first got the opportunity and I think I got most of them.

@JESSY3236 if they hold attention well enough I don't notice how long they are

@Marty1 No, it's not possible to add more than one photo per post (a 'post' meaning a discussion, response or a comment). Clearly, in Septemeber, there were thoughts of allowing more functionality but whether those are still just pipe-dreams or not remains to be seen. I suspect, though, that it would be quite a big job to add that functionality and might require more server space and bandwidth than is feasible.

@Marty1 If you look at the date, you'll see that my response and the comment were posted last September. The server is the big computer where the myLot program is actually stored and runs from. It stores all the data - over 2 million discussions and all the photos which are uploaded. That's quite a lot of storage space! Bandwidth means the amount of data uploaded and downloaded every day (or hour or month). A lot of large photos in a web page means that a lot of data has to be sent to your computer and all of the other computers which are looking at that web page. If a really large number of people are looking at a particular website, the server sometimes can't cope with it all and either slows to a crawl or stops altogether.

Yeah, this is a pretty big undertaking. I think we'd like to keep everything flowing through discussions & activity like it works currently, but perhaps adding more functionality to content-creation so content-authors can add more than just emoticons and one photo. And also improving navigation so it's easier to find the types of content that interests you. Right now we're focused on monetization and bugs and will circle back and hopefully then look at the user-experience again at some point soon.