Angelfire Member URLs
Mood:  quizzical
The Angelfire team is working on some future feature improvements to the site in the way we handle member URLs. Though we don't have a focus group or anything formal of that variety, there is some consideration being given to changing (at least for new members) the URLs that are used to visit a member's site. Since this is obviously a big area of concern for members, I thought I'd ask for some feedback and see how people think of the system.

Currently, Angelfire uses what could be called "numbered states" for member names and URLs. That is, your member name is likely to be "ma6/foobar" instead of something more natural to remember and your site address would be https://www.angelfire.com/ma6/foobar. Of coursem not all "states" are geography-based: we have 'pokemon', 'wizard', 'weird', and several dozen other topic sections for member names also.

Do you like that system?

One easy change that has been proposed is to eliminate the "numbers". So, new members could sign up again for "ma/foobar". If we did that, we could either continue to have the location and geography "states", or we could switch to just using one or the other.

Alternatively, we could do something more adventurous and have no states at all, similar to Tripod. New users would signup for "foobar" and would get the site address http://foobar.angelfire.com. In that case, we'd want to allow for some way for the current users to get the nicer names, but that may be quite difficult or impossible.

And, in addition to these, we're also considering a number of other possible changes. (Separating out the URL from the membername, for example. So your site name and your member name would not necessarily be similar.) In the end, the team may elect to do some of these things or something else entirely, but I'm curious about member opinion.

Do you like the current system? Do you like Tripod's better? How do you feel about the different possible alternatives? Any other way that you really wish things worked?

Thanks,

JP