Born from personal musings and public and private discussions, this article could be useful to others, but mainly it is a note to myself of AW bugs, omissions and suggestions. There have been many discussions on how to improve AW, and it could be that some changes have been done already and I haven't realized yet. If you see mistakes or have suggestions, just send me a message.

I'm trying to code the items according to importance:
1) needs to be done (***)
2) could be done (**)
3) it would be OMG KEWL!!!1!!!! if it was done but it's not a priority. (no asterisks)


MAIN AW PAGE
I know that new main AW pages are in the works and I thank all those who are working on them. For the moment I'll list the problems referring to the normal main AW page.

• Main problem: it's a double of the Daily Index. Isn't it possible to merge the two?

SUBSCRIBE/AVAILABLE FEATURES

• *** Update the Subscribe/Available Features page. It does NOT say how many journal entries are available, and the number of available daily posts is wrong, at least for citizens (4, not 2).
• ** Use the Subscribe/Available Features page to give some essential info to newbies:
  - Do not use non-Roman (?) characters in persona and home names, or it might make your home impossible to access.
  - Deleted journal entries are irretrievably lost.
  - Daylings must not delete images from their image gallery.
  - Important links (CoC etc)

HELP AND WELCOMING THREADS

• We now have the following very redundant situation. Can something be done about it? Especially for the Help threads, isn't it possible to have some form of moderation that allows to move, merge or delete posts so that things for newies and stone-brained Saxon scribes are a bit clearer?
  
  DEVELOPMENT AND PLANNING BOARD: Celebrations threads and help threads are too mixed up. (For example, now the Decennalia threads are here, but they and the help threads tend to drown each other. How about a separate Decennalia board?)
  - Bugs and Other Mysteries (main bug thread)
  - Features and rollouts (turned into a bug thread)
  - AW's Wailing Wall (turned into a bug thread. Maybe its laudable original function is not clear from the title? Also because there is already "In Memoriam" and "Friends in Need" under AW Discussions)
  - Ideas and Suggestions (mostly does what it says on the label)
  - Ideas for groups, new and old (very useful, but tends to get lost)
  - Ancient Worlds Set Up (not sure how it works)
  - (other threads)
  
  AW DISCUSSIONS:
  - I have a question and I can't find the answer anywhere! (turned into a bug thread, and fallen into oblivion)
  - Membership Renewals (shouldn't it go under Help?)
  - Living in the 'Hoods (viable)
  - The 'Hoods of Ancient Worlds (totally forgotten, and a double of Living in the Hoods)
  - (other old threads)
  
  HELP:
  - Beginners' Guide to AW I (went off topic and turned into a bug thread)
  - Beginners' Guide to AW II (same as above, actually I don't even distinguish them)
  - Volunteers of AW (forgotten)
  - Arachne's Web Help Center (useful and viable)
  
  WELCOMING NEWCOMERS. If I'm not crazy, this board does NOT appear on the Daily Index like all the other boards, just on the main AW page. Madly confusing.
  - Newbie Help (viable, but I wonder if it shouldn't be under Help - maybe not)
  - Hi! I'm new here (main welcoming thread)
  - Introductions (identical to the above)
  - Other threads, among which a lot of empty threads, probably started by Newbies who believed they were posting messages. Couldn't they be deleted? And has anyone ever answered to these Newbies? If someone hasn't it's sad, but then again, with this plethora of threads we have to look for newbie intro all over the site!

DAILY INDEX

• *** Unclutter the Daily Index. Now we have Google ads too. It's a necessary evil and most sites have them. But it becomes even more vital to make info more readily visible and accessible. For example:
• *** Put the name of the group or board under the title of each post, not just the thread and subthread. Otherwise it's easy to overlook it.
• ** More posts on the Daily Index, 20 or 30 instead of 10: it would be easier to read back posts if one has been absent for some time, especially given the ever-increasing activity, festivals etc.
• Make gifs smaller, if not get rid of them altogether. And we don't need the tiny images in front of every world's name and every world's thread in the left-hand column, they are too tiny to look nice.
• Have the most recent 3 sub-threads appear under the name of the most important boards as is now with the AW Celebration board in the Intro page. (I'm not sure I remember what I meant by this, I'll get back to you...)
• ** A way of distinguishing board threads, group threads and 'hood/property threads.
• A self-refreshing daily index.
• The possibility of ignoring certain threads.
  

HOMES

• *** Show date of joining AW or a group, and of creating a property.
• ** The links "Edit stylesheet" and "Edit backgrounds" at the bottom of the home page lead both to the same page.


• ** The numbers of Estates, Books and Artifacts in the boxes in the upper right mean nothing right now and are misleading.
• Some way of knowing (a "pling" or pop-up window) when I get a scroll at my homesite while I'm logged in, or when someone enters my chat while I'm not there.
  
• Enlarge the edit box.

JOURNALS AND POSTS

• *** A "Cancel" button for journals and posts that is WELL AWAY from the "Submit" button and offers some option like "Are you sure?" :P
  
• *** As said above, nowhere it says how many journal entries are available.
• *** Bug: If you delete journal entries, the "slot" is gone forever. If you had 10 now you have 9, and so on. SO DON'T DELETE JOURNAL ENTRIES!
• ** Journals are very hard to navigate, though the search function works fairly well. (or does it?)
• ** A way of ordering the journals. If one has many of them, the newer and/or updated ones might be at the bottom of the list.
• Some HTML editing function - insert links automatically, format the text etc. But it is nice already to have limited HTML possibilities even in TEXT mode.

GRAMS

• *** A resizeable gram window so that ALL incoming grams can be seen and none get lost.
• ***A Gram Log Search device
• ** Bug: it's impossible to send grams from the Gram Log. It could not be implemented anyway because it would get around the "no gram" options selected by the receiver. Remove the button and the text in the messages page about the option to send a gram from the person's house.
• ** Number of expended grams at the top of the gram window and not at the bottom.
  
• Having the number of daily grams near a person's name on the companel could give an inkling whether that person is chatting or has exhausted his/her grams.
  
• A "pling" for grams, like Yahoo messages.
  
• A pling or a popup when one is down to the last gram +1.
• Another name for the companel, the one that appears in the Windows lower bar when the window is minimized. If it were named "Companel-Ancient Worlds" instead of "Ancient Worlds Companel" it would be easy not to click on it by mistake while switching between windows.

WORLDS AND NEIGHBOURHOODS

• Problem: Navigation. It is not easy to see at a glance which discussions in the 'hoods are active. I wanted to respond to a post lately and could not find it anymore if not scrolling through pages and pages of the Daily Index.
• Problem: Once one opens a 'hood discussion from the Daily Index, it is hard to understand where one is at a glance. The links on top of the page (example: "Ancient Worlds > Germania > Middangeard > General Historical Discussions > The Peoples of Middangeard") can be seen only if one has Java installed.
  
• *** Get rid of the "featured hoods" on a world's page. At most, feature only 3 and on the right column, like threads on the Daily Index, thus leaving room for links that could help hood navigation.
  
• ** A list of all recent posts on each world's or each 'hood's main page, like the ones in groups or boards.

ARTICLES

• *** Have a working, clickable "Library of..." button (see at the top of this page).
  
• ** How does the "Feature" feature works? Where is the article actually featured? It would be nice that 1 or 2 chosen articles could be featured on the Daily Index like the featured threads.
  

CHAT

• ** A general upgrate of the chat room. Many complain of slowness, difficulties and bugs, both in the normal chat and in the flash chat.
• The option of deleting chat archives.
• An "ignore" function in chat. Or, an extreme self control that should allow chatters to NOT REPLY ABSOLUTELY to the provocations of EVIDENT TROLLS.

...MORE...