The first new site feature to mention is what you're reading: the news feed. Especially at the beginning, this site is rolling out a lot of new features, and I wanted a way to let people know about it. The newest news item will be displayed on the homepage, and you can also subscribe to our news feed.
The second new feature I wanted to mention is usernames. This isn't to allow you to log in with a site-specific password (though that may be added in the future). For now, it's simply to give your URL a more human feel. As the site develops, the username may get used for more features as well. To get your username, go to your edit profile page and click on the extras tab.
Now the survey: I must say I was astounded at the response I got. In one day we had 190 responses. I'm making the survey results public, but here's an overview of the results:
There was a three-way split for homepage profiles between email verification, verified status and real picture status. I interpret that as meaning most people want verified status but no real picture status to appear on the homepage. That's the way the site will work for now, though I'm going to keep the "real picture" status in the database in case we decide to revise this in the future.
The vast majority wanted email address verification alone to appear in the browse users list. We'll still sort the list by verified users first though, to prevent spammers from rising to the top.
51% of people wanted a new design, and 42% didn't. For anyone interested in offering a new design: please send an email to me personally, or preferably to the Haskell cafe, with a rough sketch of what you can come up with. Remember, the idea is to make the site look professional.
Most people are satisfied with gravatar and OpenID, so modifications there will come later.
The most desired feature is job listings, followed by news (guess that one is done), company accounts, polls, message boards and "fan" status.
I've added Disqus comments to the news items, so feel free to chat all you want. I'm not sure yet if I'll be posting all of these news items to the Haskell cafe or not; some people want that, yet I'm still worried about annoying everyone else. I also may post them on the Haskell subreddit, but we'll see on that one as well.
