I sort of have been thinking about this theoretically for a while now, but it didn't really come together in my mind until I was walking around outside earlier today. This post is partly to help me remember it later on, and partly a request for comments from everyone here. It went from a very complicated original concept to this very simple one:

- Posts are owned not by the message board, but by the poster. Each poster is its own message board. For instance, every post I make goes into a database with my User-ID code, and every post HH makes goes into a database with his User-ID code.

- What were formerly Message Boards do not contain any posts. They're actually "Topics" that a poster chooses when he or she posts a message. There can be a moderator-approved list of topics, or optionally, poster-sponsored topics (probably not though, due to the excessive number of topics this would create). This makes it similar to the hash tags and "trends" feature of Twitter and Facebook.

- Posts can be made to multiple Topics instead of a single one at a time.

- Messages can therefore be viewed by Poster or by Topic. You can choose to follow a particular poster's posts, or all posters post's on a Topic.

- Moderators keep an eye on a topic, and can remove a poster's topic-link if the post doesn't apply to that topic. That would effectively be like deleting a post from a message board. If the poster's post has no more topics, it's placed in a Deleted queue and no longer appears in a poster's list of posts. This feature is really neat: Because it sort of requires an "election" between moderators to delete a post entirely.

- Managers on up can remove a poster's post from all topics at once (deleting it) and remove topic-links from a post.

- Posters can be banned from using individual topics by moderators, or from all topics by Managers on up.


Here are the possible difficulties of the new concept:

- Not yet sure if it's possible; I know I can index user's posts, but aggregating them so they appear in a master index page might kill the server dead.

- It would be difficult to figure out how to manage posts by posters who don't have an account. While there currently is a "key" password system to allow them to add/modify/delete posts without logging in, those users have no User-ID associated with that. I'd have to find a way to map the posting name/password to a unique User-ID.

- I'm not entirely sure how to import existing old-style posts into the new system. I know it *can* be done, just not how to go about it just yet.


Comments? Questions?

...because it's not something I'm seeing. Because of that, I'm guessing it's a network glitch, which is going to be a real pain to track down since ISP's are not responsive at all these days. They generally have the attitude that you're lucky it works at all.

If I do start seeing a cause at the software end, I'll fix it almost immediately.

Btw, I'm going to see if I can add some kind of logging feature that can detect incomplete requests, but I'm not sure if it's possible yet (since over half that is browser side).

On dial-up, I find if I try to edit a post, I then get a "Bad Header Request" and see the entire post in one long stream of HTML. To get back to the board I then have to go and delete the Cookie that has the saved text in it. Now that I figured out the Cookie thing it's not a huge deal, but it is a bit of a pain (added to the eternal pain of dial-up )

~Hat~

Has that happened since Sunday? I patched a problem with the auto-save cookie back then, it might be related.

I still lurk, but I don't know about this, Jason. Segregating people into individual boards might hurt the communal atmosphere. Plus, I'm a little wary of that "invidual topics being banned" clause as someone who (albeit rarely) tends to post NC-17 rated stories.

Did you slip through a worm-hole and end up in 1998?

Just kidding, bud. But I have to ask, why the antiquated net connection?

It's actually the complete opposite. It makes things so you don't have to choose a single topic to post - you can select multiple topics to post in (since the PVB only has one though, there will be little change here in that regard). Same with deleting - if it's removed from a topic, that doesn't necessarily completely delete the post until it's removed from all topics.

The banning from individual topics works exactly like banning from a message board now - I just added that to emphasize that global posting won't affect the ability to ban from individual message boards.

I think the confusion came from the terminology. Basically, topic = message board. It just has a different name.

I like to call it "no choice". I have high speed at work, but since I live in the country high speed isn't available. I could get what I like to call "medium speed" but the set-up cost is $500, and I'm not willing to fork over that kind of cash considering I rent my house. If I owned it I'd think about it.

The Canadian government announced funding for rural broadband service and my area should be included in that, but who knows when we'll actually see results. They granted the funding to a company I've never heard of and I couldn't find a website for them, which is never good for a comapny that'll be selling internet!

~Hat~

Tee hee.