Now & the Future

In response to the recent feedbacks/suggestions we’ve received via here and here as well as the contact form.

I’d like to share more things about FlameUp with our growing userbase.

1. FlameUp is completely self-funded right now and consists of a very small team at this point based in NYC but we’re likely to have more people join the very soon once we’re in full gear.  We do have moderators and also a designer working on the project still, but we’re definitely looking for coders which we’re lacking, if you’re experienced and want to join the team, please use the contact form here.
2. The site was originally designed/coded by personal friends but we ended up outsourcing the project to a 10+ team and so far they’ve done a great job building this from ground up in PHP5/MySQL5 with CSS/Ajax of course.
3. Our vision is to create a space where everyone can share and discuss their thoughts openly and at the same time let some steam out and relax after ranting/commenting/flaming others on the website.

Being a full time college student, it is definitely much harder for me to be able to work full-time on the project but we’re definitely making progress. Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be doing mainly 5-10 things to improve FlameUp, but they will not be small tasks.

Originally we built the site around the way DIGG works, but the site is so different at the end of the day that now we have a system/site up, we’ll definitely be focusing more on differentiating ourself and adding new features. Below are the main things we’ll be focusing on aside from fixing bugs/layout issues as we move on.

1. Homepage with better customizations / usability for users whether logged in or not, and more area/space for featured rants vs uservoted rants.
2. Commenting system that moves a little away from the simple digg commenting like system we have implemented right now but one that encourages more discussion and even easier to follow and to join the discussion.
3. Better navigation/browsing of rants by categories, tags and so on, one that is more user-friendly and clear. Currently you can using the “FILTER” in the Browse page but it is a bit advanced or hard to find.
4. Minifeed / Bookmark rants that you want to keep track, that’s more functional and accessible than favorites option, possibly by making the home page more personalized by having your bookmarked posts display there, and having rants annotated when responded to after your last comment. That way you can keep track of the discussions you’re part of.
5. More style = More attitude. We’ll definitely be doing things here and there to add more differentiations and try to move ourselves away from the digg similarities that we’ve originally built around. We are original but we want to give our users the feel that we’re not just original in the “content/userbase” we have, but also the “style/feel” that we have.
6. Recent Activity / Profile page definitely needs more improvements and we’ll really have to look into it more and work on it. Our original design was very different but we ended up in a way following digg’s layout as it was much easier/quicker to get the “BETA” out that way as we were on a restricted time frame to get this done and the beta out due to the election. We’ll definitely be spending more time on it as that is also what we consider important.
7. Ranting & Posting will also be improved in the sense we will look into adding (1) spellchecker (2) encourage attaching images/videos which users do not embrace right now (3) Try to add filters so that rants with all “CAPS” or 1 word rants gets filtered out / disapproved before they even get submitted. (4) A timed option to edit all rants / comments. (5) Increase more filters/limits for anonymous users so they can’t spam.
8. Friends / Networking should be easier and also encouraged more with some incentives, maybe having groups / networks in flameup for users with common feelings / anger / views on issues etc.. would be a good start. We’ll look into this more and see what is possible and what we can do.

I think the 8 things above is what we’ll be concentrating on over the next few months besides debugging current bugs and moderating the site of course. We’ll continue to keep everyone updated but please remember, if you have suggestions, please contact us using the CONTACT FORM or just post a RANT like many users did, believe me, we read it. If I miss it, a moderator will see it and notify everyone.

Anyhow, thanks for everyones support so far, cya for now!

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