Community Profile

So, when Dreamwidth was in closed beta, I (zvi) kept sending Denise (denise) these little notes. The notes would say things like: we're going to have [common blog feature], right?; or I really like that [useful, user created comm on a different journaling service], can I make one on Dreamwidth?; or we should have [a way to integrate this popular web service]; or [useful Dreamwidth tool] is in the wrong place. And sometimes Denise was totally on it and there was already a bug filed. Sometimes she'd never thought of that before and she'd say, "Dude, you are so right!" (except she doesn't say dude. or so right.) Sometimes I had identified an actual problem but a developer thought of a much cooler solution.

And then one day she said, "So, you want to be a "user idea gatherer"? You'd write me these little notes on purpose. With a bunch of other people writing notes like that. It'll be fun."

But I said, "Nah, I'd rather be a cool hunter."

She said, "Oh, I love that term! Awesome." (Except she doesn't really say oh.)

So, that's what a cool hunter is doing, looking for stuff to pass along in those little notes. So if there's something you do on Dreamwidth that's too hard (you have to use an outside service to make it happen, or you have to do 6 or 8 fiddly steps to make it work), tell a cool hunter about it. If you've noticed people doing something creative or kooky or spectacularly useful with the service, then tell a cool hunter about it. If you don't know a cool hunter, don't worry. We're reading the comments in dw_news. We've joined the dw-discuss mailing list. We're ever so casually reading entries from our network.

The cool hunters tell the devs, "Hey, it's too hard to do X, and people like to do X, so I think you should make a thing that does X." And the developers try to figure out how to do X without making everybody who hates X mad. Or killing the servers. Or spending more money than DW has.

You don't have to tell cool hunters things, of course. If you have a clear idea of how to make DW better, you're probably better off telling dw_suggestions. But if all you know is that "It's too hard to do X," tell a cool hunter. We're here to serve as a cool to developer translation service.

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If you would like to be a cool hunter, instead of just reporting cool things on the open form, fill out some trial cool reports. When you have a certain number of good reports (starting out, I'm looking for three), I'll add you to the comm.

The most important skill is distinguishing between a cool report and a bug report. Cool reports are enhancements, and they're usually spotting users doing something the software was not designed to do. (They can also be spotting other software doing something you think our software should let you do.)

Bug reports are about flaws, they're when the software is not doing the things it was designed to do, or when it does them extremely poorly. Bug reports should be submitted to Support.

Example cool report