When I was a noob, I wondered what the point of rating threads on DLP was. It seemed to be almost an e-peen thing that was added on so that OPs could feel good about themselves if they'd made a good thread. It wasn't until later that I realised their significance here. I wouldn't be surprised if some noobs temporarily assumed that the correct method of rating a fic was to write a "x/5 vote" in their posts without realising that they should use the Rate Thread tool instead.

Can we change the "Rate Thread" button to "Rate Fic" in the Library subforum? It'd slightly ease confusion for noobs grasping how DLP works.

yak suggested,

Occasionally it can be difficult to tell who-is-who with DLPers changing their nicks, as mentioned here: https://forums.darklordpotter.net/showthread.php?p=467936

It would be very useful to be able to see a list of nicks previously associated with an account. Place it in the "About Me" tab in their public profile.

As an addendum to that, when people change their nicks give them a tiny mask icon next to their name for the next 30 days, so that we know they're an old fag wearing a new identity.

Something like this:

Space Ghost http://i.imgur.com/Qx9XT.gif <-- not sure how to make background of .gif transparent.

Merrill suggested,

Assuming it's feasible, one way of going about what I'm thinking about is coding that forum to behave differently.

Rough sketch of what I'd like to see:
http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y21/Helvius/exampleofsomething.png

Mature
Work in Progress
Alternate Universe

Either make the initial poster capable of picking two or three tags, in addition to the story's rating, or perhaps experiment with allowing the DLP membership as a whole being able to adjust the story. Each poster (who actually reviews) is able to select one or two tags that have a very easily understood symbol associated with it. After 5 or so reviews, the forum automatically adds the symbol next to the story in thread-view (as pictured above). The above is an example of perhaps an alternate universe symbol. You could do the whole "user deciding thing"s with the rating of the story as well; each reviewer could select what he feels the story's rating is.

My main thrust is streamlining and unifying the process by which stories are reviewed, tagged and added to the library. Basically Apple-fying the library and making it more accessible. That way the new user and the casual user can easily understand it. Hovering over any symbol should give you the meaning in that bubble script thingy (have no idea what it is, but it is yellow).

A story shouldn't be clogged with symbols so only the top 2 or 3 tags would result in a symbol being generated near the title of the story.

In addition to that, and borrowing this idea from Ashaya, although she was really only speaking of the contest entries, there needs to be an ability for the user to see the summary without ever having to click on the thread. Perhaps a little [+] symbol next to the title that would expand that box in thread-view and give you a 250 character summary (or whatever amount).

Just some ideas I'll kick into the thread.

Expanding on what Merril suggested regarding the Library and the UI, a different way to post things in For Review.

When you create a new thread to post a story, there's not only the normal text field, but a form, which includes fields like Category, Rating, Summary, Pairing, etc., which you *must* fill out to post the thread. What you have entered then automatically becomes the header you currently have to write yourself. The text field is only there for your opinion and the maybe the rating.

With this submit mask, all threads will have a minimum standard, even if some new guy hasn't read the Posting Format Sticky.

Furthermore, since it's submitted through a form, there's a chance to save it as specific attributes of this particular thread in some way and display them like Merril suggested. Maybe some of the fields could be drop-down boxes where you can only select things (e.g. Rating), and thus, since the same rating always gets the same name, you could save the attribute through a tag, which is automatically created, making it possible to look at all fics with the same rating at a glance, use the tag to create a thread icon, ...

I'm sure there are other ways to implement it, though. The basic idea is to assign specific attributes to story threads, and to make sure all Library (and WbA?) threads *have* those attributes.