Some fun little goals to achieve across the site, such as:

• Lonely: post on a Friday night
• Selfish: Try to "like" one of your own posts
• Lots of free time: x forum posts in y days
• Cartographer: x contributions to Locations
• Fat controller x contributions to Locos
• Blue-sky thinker: x contributions to the Ideas module

Allow users to not need to upload to flickr or another site and then have to tag.  Allow users to add photos to the event and use the new dams to store and catalogue the photos.  Have a feature to review all the images across events and then allow later for users to vote on the best photos from the event.

the other day when i was out near the Tanunda's old passenger station i noticed some people clearing the line that once had the limestone Penrice train ant the Barossa wine train it is broad guage and had not been used for at least 5 years could this be the start of something new

if anyone has inside information please respond ASAP.

Can you make it happen when a user posting in the forums uses a twitter @xxxxx for a railpage user that user is notified they have a mention.  You could get an email notification like you get for subscribing to a thread and have a link to the mention.

Why not build a train tracker service at railpage so we can all have access and it can be shared around between all the members freely.

The tracker has been taken down according to the forums bring it back.

Maybe expand the sightings to trams and plot it on a map?

If you field is online and using the site why not be able to send them a message in instant system so you can chat between one another. To see if they are online why not show the status of a user being online or offline when you are in the forum posts and a user has posted.  See you might want to ask a question and directly so you could click to instant message and then have a chat.

The thought just occurred to me when chatting with the sweet chap from Gheringhap Loop on Facebook.  it is convenient to chat online with a party who might be logged into the railpage system.

This is standard across google, yahoo and facebook.

Adding this ability would be great.  Please consider this as it would be very useful when you are trying to look at a issues with the system and be able at the same time to converse on the subject with the railpage person or someone else you are wanting to chat with.

Think about how to reward people for donations (I have just made a donation via paypal) and think the following might be a possibility.

Paypal has an API.  Link a donations workflow to paypal for donating to the site (it must cost a bit to maintain this beast) and link the payment and amount back to the railpage account/user.

Once a donation has been made the user receives a badge. the badges can be coloured representing the different levels of financial commitment they have provided.

Platinum over $1000
Gold
Silver
Bronze

etc.

Then other users would be aware of their status.  When additional costly services are added to Railpage financial members get access first and without the need to have a contribution ratio.

Seeing as we can now log in with both Facebook and Google+, how about catering to Twitter users?

Registered users who've donated to Railpage in the last x months, as a thankyou, have ads turned off.

When a user or potential user visits railpage a pop-up is presented to the user which asks the user to subscribe to a daily or weekly newsletter which lists the top 10 or 15 news items for the day. 

This provides the ability to obtain the visitors email address which can later to used to convert them to a user.

Turn this into a general notifications stream for all users.  

New forum posts being followed, new PM's and new location data etc. could all be sent to this stream.  Later when and if you can follow a user, this information could also be sent to the notifications stream.

All activities on the site you are monitoring including railcam updates could be sent to the notifications stream.  Once this is running it is very easy to move this streeam to an RSS based feed or even for a notifications centre APP for iOS or Android or both.

Thinking more about it, what about having the notifications stream advised you of new jobs and also new train location information as I have just mentioned in the forums?

A notification stream is a central listing of all activities on the site the user is monitoring.

Implement the notification stream suggested here, but instead of having a separate stream, have the notifications sent as a PM.

Currently only news articles are sent to our twitter feed using a 3rd party service.  Railpage has a large twitter following so this could be leveraged more.  

For the following actions a tweet is sent via their API:

DOWNLOADS
The approval of a new download on the site should produce a new tweet:

"A new download  has been added to the site in section XXXX http://xxxxxxx (URL) @Railpage"

PHOTO COMP
Each time a new photo comp entry is approved on the site the photo description, Comp month and year and URL are sent to the twitter feed. It would also be nice to send this notification to user s who are on the list of either entering or voting using the pop-up via chrome.

Could we also send a post to the facebook page timeline announcing the new photo and allowing users to click through to the photo to review.  It would be helpful is some of the notifications to facebook could be managed on an automated basis.

A tweet about the voting being open should be sent to the twitter feed.

LOCATIONS
When a new location is approved a tweet is sent to the feed with Details and URL. Sending this to the timeline on facebook would also assist.  We could also pop up notify users who have notifications turned on.

Perhaps this could form part of the current notifications engine where certain actions are sent to the twitter feed.

I will kick this off.  As discussed in the developer forum a photo competition module would be a fantastic addition to the site.

After reading again the threads and the thread on the ability to upload an image to the site here are my thoughts:

Users can submit only 1 image per month for the competition. 

The monthly competition has a theme.  this could be heritage month, main line, coal etc.

Once a user has submitted their image which must be on the railpage DAMS the image is then tagged as entered.

A user cannot submit the same image for a comp more than once every 6 months.

There is an RSS feed for the monthly competition which is syndicated to the internet.  probably the facebook page Railpage has and maybe twitter

users who enter the competition are advised by notification of other users submissions. This is by way of email announcement.

Submissions are open for the month with voting starrting at the commencement of the month and ending on the last day of the month.

Once images are entered voting for images commences.  As more photos are entered more images to vote on.  this will ensure users get their images in early.

Users who submit into the competition enter a league table. This league table is an ongoing table which lists the most voted images in the competition across all months.

users cannot see the number of votes per image until the end of the monthly voting and the winner announced.

users cannot vote on their own image.

Something like the UK-based Realtime Trains http://www.realtimetrains.co.uk which presents real time movements at any defined location to anyone with a web connection.  Works on desktops, mobiles and tablets including lineside subject to 3G service.  Lets you know whether it's worth waiting and highlights unexpected or unusual workings and cancellations.

Has any thought been given to a user who has lost their password (i had issues today) having a feature to enter their email address and having done so their username and password will be sent to them probably a username and a new password reset link or screen?

Might be something worth thinking about.

As the Rolling Stock site has disappeared, a Rolling Stock register along the lines of the Locomotive one would be a real boon.

I don't know if the past Rolling Stock site info exists anywhere.

Ted (Teditor) Freeman

My idea is loosely linked to the pop-up idea. What if we could also have an RSS feed for a user?

http://www.railapge.com.au/users/rss/hitachi for example?

Then we could follow individual users on the site. Many users on here are well worth the read and could be followed on the site and also RSS.

The RSS feed could be used to post to the users twitter account if they had one.

if the RSS feed could be made available for a location then railcam updates could be announced to other news sites and also twitter etc.

Can we have a feature allowing a user to search for a train number in railpage and have returned the train number with running times?

By way of example

https://www.railpage.com.au/radar?mode=train&id=6BM4 this information would be accessible.  The train listing is great but needs to be manually entered via the URL above.

Next and at the same time have a search feature added when you search for a locomotive.  using the existing search at the top right return a location fix for the locomotive you search and if not on a train then return the last known location.

For added security, use the login history of a user to alert via email/PM about activity considered to be unusual, and ask them to verify if this unusual activity was executed by them or not.

Maybe the newsletter could vary on a weekly basis consisting of news and also events on the system like the photocomp has been really good to watch. Maybe include most active or posted threads in the newsletter with links and also include new ideas what have been added so we get an idea that something new exists?

Send a weekly jobs update email to users.  This should contain a list of new jobs which entered the network and a summary of the job and link to the full job advertisement.