Il futuro

Lately, we (the guys) have been thinking on what direction we want iCM to be headed. As a result of our discussions, we have a list of things we want to change or do differently. In general, you can say that we ourselves want to focus less on content and more on technology. The responsibility for the content would move even more to the users, that means you! There are several reasons for this change:

• You are much more knowledgeable than us. (Piet hasn't even seen Schindler's List :teehee: ) So who better to determine if a list should become official than you?
• You have strength in numbers. We are only three, whereas you are many. It would be undoable for us three to check all comments, but a group of moderators would do a lot better.
• As we work on iCM in our spare time, that leaves us with precious little time as it is. Therefore, we should preferably only work on those things that only we can do (the technology), whereas content managing is something you can help us with (and do a lot better most likely).

So what sort of content handling tasks would we like to have our community of users do? This is a short list of things that we think a group of moderators could help us with:

• Moderating comments
• Marking (and perhaps even removing) cheaters
• Editing official top lists (keeping them up-to-date)
• Selecting and adopting lists to become official
• Possibly helping us answer user questions sent through our mail form

If you have ideas on what other tasks you think you can do, please let us know!

Besides these content handling changes, we also have some changes planned for the website:

• Create a responsive version of the website (which we are working on, see beta.icheckmovies.com)
• Strip away unused functionality. Some functionality is only rarely used or used by few people. For us, that means we have to spend a lot of time on things that are not used much. This type of functionality is something we want to remove from the website. The reason for this is simple: less functionality/code to maintain, the better we can make the rest of the website. Of course, we will be letting you know what features we want to remove, but these are likely candidates: groups, memo's, the friends-only privacy setting. We understand that losing functionality is never fun, but where applicable, we will be making the existing data available to the users so you would not lose all your memo's for example. If you now think "meh", I don't really like these changes, the next items will hopefully get you excited!
• We want to create an API. With an API, people can create programs/websites to interact with iCM. This would open up the possibility for people to create an app, without us having to develop it ourselves (although we might still do that)
• We will open-source as much of our software as possible. This means that you can not only view the code we are using, but also help us with it! The website will be one of the few things we will not be open-sourcing though.

Furthermore, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we don't do iCM to get rich. For us, the only reason we have paid accounts is to pay our server bill and to invest in hardware (servers, etc.) from time to time. One of the results of the iCM questionaire we did was that many people paid us just because they want to support us. You guys are awesome!

Let us know what you think!