[Warning: this post will drift further off topic the more of it you read. :p]
On 15/07/05, Bennett Haselton <bennett(a)peacefire.org> wrote:
This language thread -- which I probably wouldn't
be able to follow even if I read
through the archives to see how it started before I joined -- seems like it has all the
characteristics of the type of out-of-control Internet debate that Brainjammer was
designed to avoid:
Perhaps before you start advocating the use of this system, you should
put somewhere a description of what it *is*. Looking at some of the
existing threads, I couldn't immediately see anything other than a
bog-standard forum.
I presume your "killer feature", as it were, is the ability to mark
posts with a "status" in terms of their relationship to the parent.
This seems like an intriguing idea, but imperfectly implemented. I
know it's just the germ of an idea right now, but given that you're
publicly advocating its use, here are some criticisms:
* The most obvious imperfection is that the status labels are not
particularly clear - why is "awaiting response" styled the same as
"incorporated into parent"?
* What's more, if the premise that posts can be made redundant by
altering their parent holds, why are "incorporated" and "withdrawn"
posts shown at all? Deleting them outright would be foolish, but
surely showing them by default defeats the object of
* Who decides when a post has been successfully incorporated? If Bob
replies to Alice's comment, and Alice amends the original comment, it
seems to me that first Alice must tell Bob that she has done so, and
then Bob must accept the amendment and withdraw the reply. If your
existing model follows this process, it's not obvious from the
presentation.
* Your presentation also lacks any kind of "audit trail" - it would be
nice to see how Alice has changed her post, and how Bob responded to
her claim to have incorporated his response. Your forumish interface
doesn't seem suited to tracking such things.
And finally, you realise this is more-or-less exactly how discussion
works on a "traditional" wiki (e.g.
c2.com, meatball, etc)? i.e. the
aim is to refactor a discussion ("ThreadMode") into a coherent
"DocumentMode", and to encourage opinions to be expressed by amending
and expanding the existing text rather than simply creating a "rival"
document. The main difference seeming to be that you are aiming to
create a structured and non-redundant discussion thread, rather than a
stand-alone document.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]