The purpose of this document is to sketch out some ideas I have for the way discussions can be handled on Signalnine. I am sick of /. style message boards. They do nothing for facilitating long term communication or meeting friends.
I want signalnine to be a place you go to and meet cool people you wouldn't have met otherwise. I want it to be a place where you can collaberate and where new things emerge on their own.
So how to get there. Most of us are familiar with BBS message bases. Several of us have been Sysops. Basically a BBS message board is simply a conference of messages sorted into topics. For instance, you can have a general BSD conference. Within that you can have a FreeBSD section and an OpenBSD section, etc. Messages are stored indefinately. Newer users can browse old messages and gain information and get the feel for how to post their own messages.
In this way you create a repository of information and contacts. In some sense this is similar to Usenet, but on a smaller, more controlled scale.
The other idea I had, is for us to make our code opensource. Since we aren't trying to profit of this, we can make our code available for everyone. The next step is to make our message conferences exportable via XML. In this way you create a network of web BBS's. So far instance, we could be the OpenSource/Free UNIX focused BBS, while someone else might take our code and make an agricultural/cattle/horse BBS.
We can export and share whatever conferences we would like. We'll also create ways for users to find new Boards. Maybe I'd accidently stumble on someone who was into Ag (or whatever esotric subject you can think of) and had information or ideas I needed and vice versa.
Most of the websites I frequent are on opensource/Linux. Therefore most of the people I know are into opensource/Linux. I want a way to find new and interesting people without having to leave my little familiar enclave.
Further, since we wrote the software we become a "hub" of the network. We are the point that people come to for bug fixes, releases, updates and more. Therefore we become the biggest site and draw traffic from all of our hubs. We also get the benefit of people debugging and enhancing our code because they are using it themselves. Basically I want it easy enough to install so they can untar our package, and have most of it ready to go (of course they still have to muck with php+mysql+apache, but that is beyond our scope).
I'm still trying to figure out how to handle news, and anonymous postings. I am thinking that if we do a news post we can link it to the appropriate BBS. That way if the story generates interested it is captured in the correct place and can spawn topics above and beyond the story. I would like to see someone post a really interesting story and have people discussing points from it months later. New users join and see the long thread and of course go read the article.
So basically within each message board you have sub message boards or subtopics for each individual news post/editorial/story.
What needs to be done: