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