I'm probably not your demographic. I'm more of a techno-luddite and I value the distance a messgae board gives me over the various "put my life on display on the internet" blog and social sites out there.

Distance is important to me. Bear in mind that in ten years of BZL/PVB posting I still haven't wanted to commit to setting up a user profile. There's no picture of me online (except a few work-related shots and some media interview stuff). I protect my privacy for professional reasons and have recently been glad of it because of divorce issues too.

So feedback #1 is that any online community has to be sufficiently flexible to allow different people to elect different levels of commitment, to make appropriate choices about how and when they interact, and to decide on their own levels of commitment to regularly following a board/thread/author.

Most of the places I work now have restrictions about how work IT is used for personal reasons. I recall Shep saying that her workplace has filters that prevent even forms being transmitted. My own company blaocks access to MySpace, Facebook etc. Elsewhere logged social networking from workplaces has sometimes led to dismissal. So feedback #2 is that low-tech under-the-watchware provision is as important for some participants as high-end multi-featured customisable interactivity is for others.

Finally, the character of sites like the PVB or even the AMB is defined by a common readership that interacts with each other. While softwear that would allow one user to block all posts from another might be useful the thrust of whatever system is used should really be directed towards making reading and replying to material the simplest thing. Feedback #3 is that the software should encourage and reward participation.

How? Maybe an option to have top-of-page link-boxes for "Most Popular Thread", "Latest Three Stories", and ""Posting of the Week" or something? Maybe an option to filter content by theme - PV stories, rants, media reviews etc - to give people chance to look first at what most interests them. Maybe a feature where each poster could recommend three postings of interest (by someone other than themselves) so I could click on "Vizh's top picks" and find out what he thinks everyone would enjoy. Maybe more visual content - the PV art gallery. We have quite an archive now if it was all assembled. Maybe the option to reply to stories via e-mail that gets translated to the reply thread.

But as I say, I'm not an expert. The board already meets most of my criteria so I'm happy to leave things as they are.

HH

It might shock you to know you're not the worst one. At Comicboards there was a huge outcry from a very vocal minority to "change it back". And I'm not talking about weeks later, the outcry lasted for the entire year - any time I made some small change, I heard from them crying "I hate it, change it back...and while you're at it, put everything else back too". I actually create a new layout called "Nostalgia" (you can choose it as a view from the top of the PVB too) in their honor.

That said, though, the more middle-of-the-road techno luddites are the ones who keep this software grounded, and ironically, compatible with newer things like mobile devices. They don't always support all the latest dynamic HTML and Javascript standards.





Another irony - I purposely created user profiles to require as little information as possible. You can create one with just a name (doesn't even have to be your real one), an email address (the same one you post with), and a password. No address, or zip code, or real name, or any of the other stuff many other message boards require for registration.

You're about as much a phantom *with* a user profile as without one. The only difference is you don't have to type in your posting name, email, and password every time you post, as long as you're logged in. I designed it that way on purpose, to keep people from being afraid of using it.





That's also why the software isn't branded heavily. It's very hard to block access to it wholesale (except on a domain-by-domain basis) because it has no real signature. I can't do much about blocking forms, however.

Actually that whole corporate attitude annoys me. Sure they have the right to tell the employees what they can or can't do on company time and company computers, but just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should*. It's lazy management- why not just chain employees to their desk to make sure they have no choice but to stay put and work?

It might seem like a farfetched comparison, but it's not. The point is that managers, rather than actually check and see if their employees are actually producing something, want automated means to measure and ensure it without even looking at the employees. That's why progress in companies is now measured in "hours". You can do nothing but wander the building for 50 hours a week and be more valuable than someone who actually works 30 hours a week and produces.





I think I've done that as much as technically possible. Hopefully.





E-Mail is troublesome, because it's prone to delivery problems. That's why I generally try to avoid it for "critical" communication. Mostly e-mail is used for notifications and such that aren't really important if you miss it.

I've been resisting using posting "tags" that posters enter to categorize posts because it depends too much on things like spelling errors, and people intentionally using the wrong tag. Happens all the time at Livejournal.





Mostly what I was concerned with is giving people the ability to follow the board without actually visiting it. So if all they do is leave Twitter open all day and reload it like a crack addict, they'll also potentially be following the PVB's posts too.

Frankly, I treat twitter and other "social network" things as strictly second-rate noise. I appreciate that some people find value in them, I just don't see how.
(and, like HH, I have to be VERY careful where I visit on the web).
The board is fine as it is - it does what it says on the tin, and the content is reasonably focussed (although you can't control that with software...). The signal to noise ration is good here (better than GITP, for example). That's what we want.