May You Live In Interesting Times (Discussion).

Lafortezza

Would this possibly lead to a slightly two-tiered system of Boards users?
Those who pay for the additional extras, would most likely pay for alot of the extras, especially if they are reasonably priced as the plan would be.

While those without the cash to pay, or those who don't use Boards enough to make it worth their while, would be left with the plain Boards.ie without any bells and whistles.

If there was another thread like this in the future after payment for additional services was in use where the Admin/Owners wanted feedback on the future of Boards, would the paying customers have more of a voice then those who didn't pay?

All I'm saying is that once the new ideas are implemented, money can become an important factor and would those people paying for additional services have/deserve/be given a bit more of a say than those who don't pay for the services, as obviously Boards can go from strength to strength with more paying customers.

L.

DeVore

well before we get into anything to do with money we are all going to have a BIG put-our-heads-together discussion on it to think it through. Its not like we're in any rush right now, though we have though about doing something for xmas.

There are some things that we all agree.

1. All boards, with the *possible* exception of Admin will remain open to everyone, forever. Boards.ie is about the boards and that should never change. The only reason I've made a possible exception of Admin is that there might be some element of voting/veto in the charter I write and Admin would be used for that. Also, I'm kinda of the opinion that if you arent prepared to support a website you really dont shouldnt have much say in how it develops.... I'm stilling thinking about that one though.

2. Payment will be for additional services, we've got to decide what and for how much but I think we'll all agree that its going to be a good deal as we dont have big costs to cover.

DeV.

p

Sorry if this has been brought up already.

Maybe it's just me but I think boards.ie's future should be in NNTP, and the website should be a webbased front-end to NNTP.

The main reason for this is that NNTP was devised specifically for Message boards and it's much more fleixble etc...

Think to the web in 10 years time. Would you prefer that for every message board you liked you'd have to log on to a different website with a different username & password etc... Or would it be better to simply launch a news reader & get a faster more customized service.

If boards did this then you'd save a load of bandwidth when people moved to NNTP so boards would require less bandwidth and less money to run.

For boards specific things such as avatars etc... you could simply put custom headers in the postings.

Also, if you really wanted to look to teh future perhaps you could simply keep it webbased but have a java/javascript(will be possible eventually)/flash custom boards nntp client on the website. Again moving things to the client, where they should be.

Macromedia currently run something like this:
http://webforums.macromedia.com/flash/
done by an program called FuseTalk


- Kevin

DeVore

As a usenet junkie of nearly 15 years now I have to say I disagree. Usenet is broken in several key ways.

1. Moderatorship is non-existant.

2. ALL content is distributed to ALL servers. Thats just plain dumb. We cant *afford* to hold all of Usenets traffic on Boards simply because there is WAY too much of it.

3. Censorship. The upstream ISP's decide what to propogate. I grew less interested in Usenet and more interested in something like Boards when they started to block political groups and abortion-information groups at source.

4. Non-community-oriented. There is very little community elements in Usenet. While there are some areas that are (ie the voting for the creation of new fora) a lot of it is decided by the ISPs and what not as described above. I dont like the way that works.

5. IE stuff just sucks (with the noted exception of ie.comp) and since noone owns it noone really gives a toss about improving it imho. There isnt really a feeling of IE Usenet community, certainly not as strong as it is here. So I would contend that you dont have as strong a local community on Usenet.

6. Spam. And lots of it. One thing I like about boards is the vigilance to stop spam dead in its tracks. Unfortunately ever since those two lawyers in the states showed that you could spam Usenet and get away with it, everyones been doing it and its awash with spam.

Just my 0.2 Euro.

DeV.

p

Originally posted by DeVore
As a usenet junkie of nearly 15 years now I have to say I disagree. Usenet is broken in several key ways.

I think you misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting boards become part of usenet, merely that the NNTP prototol is used alone on a boards server.

e.g. you connect to news.boards.ie and and just get the boards.blah

I think that addresses most, if not all of the concerns you voiced.

- Kevin

Dustaz

well, apart from the fat noone likes nntp

Celt

Originally posted by Dustaz
well, apart from the fat noone likes nntp

Really?

drjolt

Originally posted by DeVore
As a usenet junkie of nearly 15 years now I have to say I disagree. Usenet is broken in several key ways.

I believe p is talking about using usenet transport technology instead of mysql as the backend for vbulletin. The advantage would be that people could use an ordinary newsreader to access the posts.

regi

There seem to be a few attempts at putting an nntp-interface onto the vbulletin database.

http://hades.gothic.at/~aoe/vbnntp/ is one and http://www.stupendous.net/vnntpd/ is another. I'll have a look into them, if there's enough demand

ecksor

That would make a lot more sense for us than altering the backend. I might use an nntp client for reading boards if we put in the option, but the lack of threading would be a pain ...