Baseballfan's topic on surveys and trophies Help make Chess.com even better! - Trophys and Surveys! seems to have been very effective in focussing suggestions for those two areas, while keeping the forum length manageable. One difficulty with the general wishlist discussions is that they cover everything (e.g. LiveChess, Forums, extensions to Tools, Interface improvements, New Features). Have you considered, for DeathWish 5, splitting it into a small number of separate topics?
Another simple option would be to lock the initial post containing the starting 30 or so items. Against each item, have a link to a topic (perhaps several items linked to the same follow-up topic). In that way, everyone can see the original list, but the details are developed in dedicated threads (including a NONE OF THE ABOVE list).
(1) Spring cleaning is in order I think, I have already sent an e-mail to chess.com to ask for a clean up of my files, i.e, id est, that is, to remove all of the unused and unnecessary forums in my home page.
These history lists (or most recently used lists) are a feature common to most organising software these days. They generally perform a useful function. Some programs (e.g. browsers) do provide a function enabling the user to clear the entire list.
paul211 wrote:
(2) This includes: my tracked activities, my latest blog and my recent activities.
How is chess.com to know (in general) that you don't want these? I imagine that most people DO want these things; I find them useful as an aide memoire. Regarding My tracked activities: you can explicitly untrack these yourself.
paul211 wrote:
(3) This action will save millions if not billions of bytes in the storage system.
Clearing the lists won't save very much storage. Each list seems to be about 1KB of text. Even if 50,000 cleared their lists, that would only amount to 50MB. In practice, the majority won't clear their lists, either because they don't want to, or they won't get round to it.
paul211 wrote:
(4) The computer system might run faster, but my point is to get rid of unwanted forums, including my own.
There is a fundamental distinction between clearing the lists and clearing the forums. The lists are pointers to the forums. The lists don't take up much space. Removal of - or clearing - the list affects only the individual loooking at the lists.
Removal of the forums themselves has much more far-reaching effects - as I have already described previously.
paul211 wrote:
(5) When batgirl answered me that a clean up job is in process I thought it might be time for all of us to do the same.
No comment.
paul211 wrote:
(6) The site could provide a check box besides all of the items in the forums I mentionned above, similar to the message page:http://www.chess.com/home/messages.html,
where one can delete or deselect the unwanted items.
Since you have included a comma in the above reference, the link does not work. The tickbox selection provided for the deletion of messages is very effective. (Have you noticed the new New! indicator?) However, I consider it would be a mistake to encourage deletion of forums since this action affects all of the participants of those forums.
paul211 wrote:
(7) Alternatively a preset time limit can be set up, say 6 months, where beyond which a user would have the choice to retain old forums or delete.
We differ on the value of retaining forums 'for ever'. Storage is getting cheaper all the time. There is 'gold' to be mined from old forums - provided that adequately powerful search and indexing facilities are available.
paul211 wrote:
(8) And if no rsponse by the user they would be deleted with a reminder over a 3 day period that the action would be taken to remove all forums beyond a certain date.
And if the person happened to be on holiday or away for 4 days when this notice arrived, ALL of their investment in contributing to forums would be thrown away.
paul211 wrote:
(9) May sound a bit radical but regular maintenance, I would suggest twice a year is not asking for a lot. I used to do mine on a weekly basis.
There are different mindsets to managing information. I personally retain all emails that I have written or received since about 1975. I consider it a useful archive. When I write something, I expect it to persist. I write it in such a way that 25 years later, I anticipate it will still make sense.
paul211 wrote:
(10) Let's hear your suggestion all of you including chess.com people.
No further comment.