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?