Suggested changes to FX

my main FX page

I love FX, and I appreciate all the work that's gone into it.  However, I think we need to get more users.  So I favor changes which will make the site more approachable to new users.  I think changes that only effect existing users should take the backseat.  Particularly since those changes tend to take a lot more work.

* = changed

October 7, 2004

Summary page
The summary page should update more frequently.  Currently it updates only once every 24 hours.
The user ids are links, but it only brings you to the accounts page with that number filled in.  That's a letdown.  I think instead it should directly link you to the account page listing their score, holdings, and orders.

Email
You should be able to sign up to watch certain claims and get an email whenever they change in value. 
You should be able to sign up to get an alert whenever any claim changes value by more than 2 or 5%.

*Claims List page
To get a list of claims you have to click a bunch of buttons.  You have to click "all claims", and show "active" claims.  Both of those should be the default.  If you click "submit query" without clicking either of these you get an uninformative page that makes it look like the site is broken.  If 90% of all form submissions use the same criteria, it seems like those should be set to the default.  Setting any default at all would be guaranteed to save some work.
The "submit query" button should be renamed "get list of claims"
*October 9, 2004 defaults were added and the search button was renamed.

Claims Page
Clicking on a claim on the main or summary page brings you to the claims page, but since you haven't entered any uid, all you can see is the description and the graph.  You can't see any of the bids.  New users will never realize that they can put in anyone's id there to see the bids.  When I first went to the site I wanted to see the bids and got stuck on this page, imagining that I had to register to get this information.  Having to put in an id to see bid info doesn't make sense, since that information isn't really private

Account Page
The most obvious use for this page is to get a list of a user's score, holdings, and orders.  You should be able to do this by typing the uid and clicking one button.  As of now you also have to select "holdings" and "booked orders".  Then you have to click "system-defined".
The sense of the buttons should be reversed - they should be checked by default and you should only have to uncheck them if you only want to see the score.  The button should be renamed "get info about player"
You can't see the BEP on this page.  The account page seems the logical center for checking info about yourself.  As of now the only way to see how much you have in each claim, and your BEP is to also look at your whole history.  It seems like you should be able to add columns for BEP, cost, income etc. 

History Page
This page is hidden underneath the account page, despite the fact that it's the most useful part of the site.
Clicking "Only show claims in which you have holdings" makes recent trades not show up in your history.  So if you want to see your updated BEP after a trade, you have to uncheck this and load all your old data.

October 6, 2004

Claim Page
Each claim page should have a bulletin board attached to it.  Registered users should be able to post links there.  Optionally they could have to pay for the priveledge of posting, or at least pay a deposit.

General
The site uses the POST method.  If it used the GET method it would allow direct linking to form submission results without having to click a button.  (The same way you can link directly to google search results; with GET the arguments are passed as part of the URL, so you just make a link already including the links).  This would allow people to link directly to histories account pages, and logged in claim pages.  It'd also allow people to write their own interface to the site (similar to how you can bypass google's search gateway (see http://www.fuseki.net/quick6.html for a bunch of them.)

October 7, 2004

Score Page
No player who registered more recently than 5 years ago is in the top 10 list.  That means that someone could have been outplaying a member of the top 10 for 4 years straight and have gotten no recognition.

I would like to see many score pages - weekly, monthly, yearly, and the current lifetime.  They could just display the rolling averages.  This might cause a little price manipulation, but it'd cause it both up and down for each claim, so hopefully that'd balance out and make the gap smaller.