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[Muddy Mudstone]

• Let any floodgate, when triggered by a lever, pass that signal on to all adjacent floodgates.

Reasoning: This allows a large group of floodgates to be triggered with only one mechanism (plus two for the lever). if there's a use for building several contiguous independent floodgates, it can't be anything to do with stopping flows. Building in flooded areas is often restricted to one tile at a time (such as the one a pump is working on), so the bridge construction interface where the width and height of the object is chosen before building it would be unsuitable here. Propagating signals would also allow unusual-shaped floodgates, such as a gate that fits an inside corner.

• Reduce the delay on being triggered from 100 to 0.

Reasoning: Slow things are less useful. Also if several adjacent floodgates open in sequence over several ticks, that would cause a lot of recalculating of pathable areas, which I understand is bad for framerate. (But a delay of 1 might lead to amusing ripple effects.)

• Make them toggle, like mechanisms.

This means that instead of being closed when the lever is on the left and open when the lever is on the right, the floodgate is closed when the lever is in whatever position it was in when the connection was created. Consequently a single lever could close one floodgate and open another at the same time, switching the input or output of a flow from one route to another.

[Bumber]

Why not just use drawbridges?

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Because floodgates start out open, while floodgates start out closed.

[fluffymormegil]

The fact that raised bridges are fluidtight is, in all honesty, the main reason I don't see floodgates as interesting. They're much easier to do the setup for, since you build them in the open state and thus they're less sequencing-sensitive.

[Waparius]

A better idea would be if floodgates had to be built over open space, and closed downwards. It would be nice to be able to dam existing waterways.

Though given what I've heard about lifts (instead of being put in as some kind of vertical minecart Toady's waiting until he does moving constructions) floodgates will probably have to wait till then for a revamp.

[Roofless]

The fact that raised bridges are fluidtight is, in all honesty, the main reason I don't see floodgates as interesting. They're much easier to do the setup for, since you build them in the open state and thus they're less sequencing-sensitive.

Yeah, but you don't get to build an indestructable artifact bridge to seal off the fun people.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

A wooden bridge will do the trick. It's indestructible - in its closed state!

[Roofless]

You mean it will not burn to bits when approached by a metal-melting-hot clown?

[tj333]

The toggle idea is a good one. The other two ideas don't seem as interesting/useful to me.

The first thing that came to mind for me on a more useful flood gate was being able to control water level. When hooking a floodgate to a level being able to choose increments of opening would be handy. Instead of being all or nothing your could set it to drain off all water/magma above a certain height. Maybe hook up two levers to one flood gate, one set to increments and the other to all or nothing for more nuanced fluid level controls.

Or a pull until fully open or fully closed option. Maybe that would work in with the planned Improved Mechanics and have a resetting requirements on traps where it would be fully set/primed (closed floodgate) and unset/spring (open floodgate) states on traps.

[Dirst]

I don't think making floodgates "conduct" signals automatically is a good idea, but allowing a single source to be ganged across multiple recipients in one step would be nice.  That is, when you place a mechanism at a recipient and then the source, you can optionally add mechanisms to additional recipients that all work off of that single source.  You still end up with a mechanism in each floodgate, but only one at the lever. 

Of course, people using levers to inflate room value simply won't exercise that option.