Hey site owners out there... I feel that in all my attention to the download stores over the past year or so, I've neglected the site listings and the owners of all the sites out there. I haven't forgotten about you... the "D" in UMD is for directory afterall. People might traffic our download stores, but part of the reason they're even here is to get up-to-date news about their favorite wam internetss. So whether you advertise and sell here or not, you're just as important and I want to do what I can do support.

I'm all out of ideas on what to do, and I feel that UMD is becoming more and more self-centric, which seems good for us, but I don't want to be an island. We need the other sites, and I'm looking for any feasible ideas (not free ads tho!) we can implement to help you out long-term. I tried the picture of the day, but.....

Anybody got any high-level ideas worth knocking around for a while?

I know I'm really new here, but perhaps pick a store at random (or current popularity) everyday or week to feature. Maybe have a model of the day and give links to work or stores you can find them in? But that might be too much like photo of the day.

Just off the top of my head...

How about letting us have control back over our Signature Files?
If we were able to place our personally designed banners (branding?) and direct links to our sites in there (as most forums permit and was once allowed here) it would undoubtedly encourage more click/visits than the illegible one inch square buttons and their s/e "masked" links, which don't even permit full name exposure (beyond 14 characters), and confuse the viewer with a link to yet another poor hollow representation of our sites. A link which in my opinion serves site owners absolutely no benefit as it does not take the viewer directly to the site, which, is why we're here. Likewise frequent posters would have the benefit (perhaps) of increased s/e exposure. It may in fact encourage more postings by site owners.

Also the "Site" listings could use a work over with sites such as "risquerenee.com" ranking under "Hotness" as being more popular than many devoted wam sites when in fact that site shows little or no wam images, hasn't updated since '07 and has never posted an update on umd since it was listed in '02. No offense.

Just sayin

Agrees with most of what wamfgcom posted, esp getting shot of the screengrab thumbnails, which really are of no use to man nor beast, and allowing us to pick our own thumbnail avatars for our sites. Making them rectangular instead of square (so a slightly longer site name can be displayed) would help too - in my case there are two that don't quite say "Saturation Hall" with nothing to tell the potential customer which is the actual site and which is the download store.

As I've been banging on about for years, confusing customers does not lead to more sales.

The new feature I'd like to see is discount codes. I want to be able to offer people who've forked out for a six month membership a set of codes that will give them a set % off the price of downloads from my store, and let each member have say three codes a month.

I could implement this myself on my site using my own payment gateway and a separate download store, but I'd rather stick with the UMD in exchange for all the support over the years.

It would be slightly technical - the UMD would have to generate the codes each month and then hve an API (or even just an email send to a nominated mailbox - parsing pop3 email is easy) which are then made available to each member in the Members Lounge. The UMD doesn't need to know which code is for which member, just that code X gives the first person to use it a discount of Y% on one transaction for up to say five scenes in a basket from store Z (basket can contain more scenes or scenes from other producers but the discount applies to scenes from the producer who's discount code is being used).

This would of course then work for anyone with the technical skill to implement it, which is probably most of the more established producers with members sites, and would closely link together producers' sites with their respective download stores.