For #1, perhaps users with a certain number of scripts in a community (say, 1) could vote other scripts in when someone nominates them for inclusion. There could be a poll on the community page. This could go the other way around for #3.

It made more sense to me when it said "News", I tend to ignore blogs, but, whatever.

I hate to say this, because the idea is sound, but without moderation you're going to end up with thousands of communities with no organization at all. We already have many people asking for scripts that already exist, that don't search or don't find what they're looking for or comment in the wrong place or duplicate something that already exists or simply don't read instructions.

You'll probably going to need a way to join communities and delete communities, and who is going to do this?

You could, on the other hand, create a communities thread in the forum and add the ability to link scripts to a community thread there. Creating isolated forums seems awkward and counter-productive to me. Dis-jointed.

Why not have categories? I know the category idea is very "late 90's", but it would at least let people have a good idea what already exists, and we can just have a few people in charge of creating new categories (or even subcategories) where things can exist. And all of this without having to remove the tags that currently exist.

Might help to make some "social" settings for scripts, let each person vote which category the script should go in.

Here is a very rough example of some categories:
-All Sites
--Ad Blocking
-Single Site
--Yahoo.com
---Mapping
---Ad Blocking
---Search
-Multi-Site
--Google & Yahoo
---Search

I wonder how much of this information could be gleaned from the GM scripts themselves?

On a site note: where the hell is the tag cloud? I thought I would see that long ago, but it never materialized, whats going on?

Time proves you should keep it simple. Communities should be as few as they need to.

In that sense it might make sense to organize the scripts only by site (Google, YouTube, etc.), and have them be taggable with Purpose Tags (interface change, new feature, misc) and Source Tags (Script.aculo.us, jQuery, XMLHttpRequest, etc.). This would put the script into subcategories, much like Gmail's mails are categorisable by location (Inbox, Spam, Trash) and then by tags (whatever tags you assign to them) making it all very organised. This is better than having sub-categories because some scripts do many stuffs and belong in many categories.

As for the ratings, Digg.com's rating would be useful here. Also the comments style rating should be usable in the comments here (it's not hard to implement). The ratings for a script might be something like:

* This is a god script!
* Cool, cool script.
* Good one.
* Meh, It does what it's supposed to.
* This script doesn't work for me.
* OK, this script is Lame.
* This script is malicious!

Only logged in users can rate it. And the rating should be weighed (like on imdb.com), older users with many good scripts have more to say in their votes (If you do decide to implement this the algorithm would look something like Google's PageRank algorithm).

PS: this is what this part of the alphabet would look like if the letters Q and R were missing.
PPS: please fix the script highlight algorithm as it's displaying a lot of scripts wrongly highlighted, and it should be easily fixable.

I like the design of userscripts.org (not the home page though), but I kinda like the way http://userstyles.org/ is organized, and also note the way they point out Stylish.
I wouldn't want you to copy it, but maybe get some ideas from it.

Another thought, might this be a place where we can share Application Scripts: http://kb.mozillazine.org/UserChrome.js
These currently aren't downloaded (as far as I know), but certainly good Greasemonkeys might find it a useful addition.

Finally, I hope Jesse already saw this post, it is nearly the same as what manixrock just said, but I like manixrock's script rating description.

Communities are what happens when tags grow up

No. Just...no.

As a casual user of this site, I have to tell you this sounds like a bad idea. This site already has forums, and a spam problem, and an interface that needs work. Who's going to be the mods for all these new communities? Who's going to deal with the trolls and the spam and the inevitable stupid flamewars? You? Random volunteers?

Frankly, I'd much rather have categories and ratings systems like verifex and manixrock suggested. And maybe a tags cloud. And email notifications when one of my favorite scripts is updated, but I'm not holding my breath for that last one.

This is pretty out of context, but i guess it does have to do with upgrades and changes, one feature I'd LOVE to see, is rating, but even more than that, I've switched to greasekit for safari as i was kinda getting sick of slow bloated firefox except when I'm developing, I'd love to see some way to say "works with greasekit" or something if possible.

I agree with trish. I think other things ought to be addressed way before this communities idea: it seems premature. Better categorisation is essential and if anything, the ability to sort search results by number of installs should be a priority. While the number of installs is a sort of rating in itself (perhaps number of comments too) but a rating system would be very nice.

Developers discussing scripts is fine as it is in the forum, IMHO, and there is not that much discussion in there to warrant something bigger and more complex.

Upon addition of a script to the site, a user could be prompted to categorise a script (from a list of categories). If miscategorised, users could flag it until it is put in the right place.

The front page of course still needs lots of work, but it's great to see improvements being made and thought about.

"You can click on the word "installs" in any script listing and it will sort via install count (also name, comments, updated date)"

Whoops. :) How long has that been there?

Incidentally, there are a few scripts with very artificially install numbers (such as the top 2).

I think you should keep the tags like they are with a slight modification.

Don't do categories because it's annoying when things should be in more than one.
The tags are good in that sense because they can be tagged multiple times.

I think the tags should be pre-defined but then if you can't find the tag you want you can just hit "other" and type in a tag.
That tag then has to be approved by a moderator.

That way the tags become tied throughout all the scripts instead of having like
"Myspace"
"My Space"
and other similar entries.

Then users either use the current search or a new "Tag Search" which you can use to search in just tags for scripts that fit all or any of the tags you specify.
Ie. User could search for "myspace"
or "myspace layout"

The first search would find all that the second would find and ofc the second would be limited to scripts that have both those tags.

Kane

Oh, and the user could select "match any tag" which would mean that if they searched for "myspace layout" they'd find any script with either or both tags.

I am interested in partenering with you on this. It just so turns out that I have a site that I just put up and am in alpha stages - reliablesource.org ---long story short, its kinda like wikipedia meets digg on free software (as in beer). I am thinking something like a digg'esque portal? In any case, I would love to bounce some ideas around -- Great site by the way!

I just read through the blog again -- I most certainly think we should partner up on this -- I'm new to your site, but this is the type of circumstance and community I've been hoping to stumble upon - in any case this is a good opportunity to leverage my site's infrastructure and mission - let me know what you think - reliablesource.org is still very new, so a lot of changes are possible.

dennis

In my view, this is certainly a good idea, and I hope to see this in future. It will certainly make the process of developing a userscript and then taking feedbacks from users for improving the userscripts a much easier task.

I would also like to be able to see some statistics if possible that would give general info about the installations being made for a my scripts. For example daily installations for my scripts etc...that would also be nice.

I think you should have a "Cool Script Of The Month".

Perhaps to help combat spam communities should 'fade' with disuse and lack of numerous participants.. possibly blackbox innards

http://www.kaochina.comhttp://caikuai.kaochina.com

thank you.
so much.