I have been a member since December and made dozens of complaints about that horrible Search engine. You can't find anything using it. If you are looking for a group which features "old school music" and you type in those keywords, you get the dreaded "Ooops!" screen. Yet there is a very active group here called "Old School SOUL Music"! How sensitive does your search have to be? It is case-sensitive - if you are searching for a member who uses the member name "BigBird" and you type in "bigbird", you won't find him - you will get an "Ooops!", like you did something stupid.

"BOOMS" are great but how about fixing the most fundamental feature of any website:

THE SEARCH ENGINE!!!

Eons is spending an inordinate amount of time on a new feature which the designers seem to like more than the members: The Booms! However, it's not working right either. I just attempted to Boom a topic which already had 3 Booms but, when I hit the Boom button, I got the submission page saying that I was the first person to Boom the topic. I was forced to take time to fill out that page which I hate to do and which puts a chilling effect on my efforts to Boom worthy topics. THEN I discovered that I was actually the fourth member to Boom the topic, not the first as indicated by Eons.

Why can't we just Boom without giving a reason? And if we have to give a reason, then give us more categories to choose from. And don't make us fill out a new submission form for a topic which has already been set up for Booms. Way too much work, those Booms!

I have been talking to the Design Team about this issue for several weeks. I don't think that it is fair for some members to not allow the receipt of Personal Messages. Especially when they can send them. If someone receives a PM which they find offensive or requires a defensive response, then they are just left hanging with no recourse other than to fight it out in public, often in group threads which are not the right place for this.

If you don't want to accept PMs then Eons can require that you are not able to send PMs either. And if you make a public statement about a member which they find offensive, then Eons should require that you must accept PMs from that member to keep down the occurrances of public fight-fests.

There are certain people on this site who missed the purpose for which many of us join Eons: to be around MATURE PERSONS. I have seen more maturity on MySpace, a site geared towards people NOT of our demographic. There are days in which I hate to log on because I know that I may be opening myself up to yet another silly attack, merely because I am outspoken. But I can handle my biz, either publicly or privately. However, I do allow those who are
drinking "Hator-Ade" or sucking on "JellySicles" to reach me privately if they have a beef with anything that I say. My personal website is posted here on my blog so I can also be reached via my direct email address. I'm even listed in the phone book - for the truly brave member who wants to tangle with me.

If we are to be a "community" and "safe haven", then members can't be allowed to say what they want about others and then hide behind the PM block option. This option is being misused - it should be to stop open communication from a member who has shown him- or herself to be exhibiting improper or offensive behavior.

Again, if you want to arbitrarily block Personal Messages, then you should not have the right to send them either. And when you choose this option and you publicly attack another member, then all of Eons "public forum" fail-safes should no longer apply. You should not be able to start something and end it by "hiding" behind an option which Eons clearly designed for other protective means. Or we should be allowed to open a group ABOUT YOU! Even if it has no group members - we can just talk about YOU publicly, all day long! That will have the desired effect of making grown-ups "play nice".

Have you noticed that if you go through all of that drama to get you post BOOM'd, when someone posts a reply, they get another BOOM window, asking for the same information to submit the BOOMing. Can Eons remove the BOOM option window from the reply posts? Just let the initial post subject be submitted for BOOMS. Otherwise a really interesting subject with get "split BOOM numbers" and lose the numbers needed to make it popular.

Also, what is the criteria for Top Picks? I've seen posts who have 1 or 2 BOOMs listed higher up than posts with 30 BOOMs. What's up with that?

How about a way that members can get points for the people who join due to their suggestion? You know, like when a new member signs up, they put down the name of the person who referred them to Eons and then Eons gives that member a Badge or something for Recruitment efforts. OK, NOW beat me up! :-)

When we answer our PMs, upon hitting the send button, I'd like the next page to be the one which has the InBox, rather than the Sent page. If you have a lot of messages, then you have to hit the InBox icon to get to the next message.

....Stop adding new features and fix the long time problems like the crappy Search Engine. BOOMs are cute, but not as necessary as being able to find members and groups.

....Have more personal involvement from the website creator, Jeff Taylor. Jane Seymour and Barack Obama are great celebrity members but how about learning more about the man who made this all possible? How can he really serve our needs if he is not involved?

....Make use of "Eons civilians" to help with the Customer Support turnaround time. Figure out a way that these civilians can access and answer the easy questions, thereby freeing up Tech Support and poor Heather for the more complex issues.

.....Have some consistancy with the text fields and blocks. Some have built-in HTML editors while others do not. Some automatically format paragraphs while others, like the Compose Mail box doesn't (a long email is one long paragraph if a member doesn't insert the old "

" code.

I'm getting a lot of PMs from people who want to join my groups (and others) but are afraid to join and post comments because they find themselves on the first page of Google. Many are concerned about identity theft since we do tend to tell a lot about ourselves, particularly in groups which encourage sharing personal experiences. A person could start a story about the loss of a child in a car accident in their town and by the time the thread is 20 posts long, we know quite a lot about the original poster.

Why is it that Eons gets "pings" from group posts and blog posts at a higher rate than many of the other popular sites like MySpace? MySpace users would welcome the opportunity to be Google'd with just the most innocent of keywords since many are aspiring or successful artists, musicians, actors, etc. While Eons was supposed to be a "safe haven" for people of a certain age to be able to have a place to meet folks and do a bit of networking, but not at the rate that we might have done in our 30s.

This is something that Eons needs to look into. We don't want this to have a "chilling effect", causing them to join but not post for fear of having their personal stories put on "front street" like that.

Comments, suggestions, criticisms?

It would help if the PMs were formatted so that there are paragraph breaks. If one doesn't use the tedious HTML coding for paragraphs (

), the sentences just run together, including any greetings or salutations.

And how about making so that a member's own Groups are shown first in the queue. I hate having to click on "Other Groups" just to find the ones that I moderate. In fact I have left many of the groups that I joined just to keep my SisterGirl Network group on my Profile page. Now that I've joined this new group, my group has disappeared again! I guess I will have to "Unjoin" Eons Advisors.....