Talk:Forum

IRC log

• Date: 20100218
• Times in UTC+1000

22:45 <@SpaceHobo> I really genuinely worry that the end-to-end model is dying 
                   its last and we're going to end up with an internet made of 
                   controlling silos
22:45 < nemo> I think there'll be a balance
22:45 <@SpaceHobo> this is why I want to bring back and fix things like NNTP
22:45 < nemo> oooh, please
22:45 <+Dumont> NO!
22:45 <@SpaceHobo> yeah
22:45 < nemo> Dumont: keep out of this. this is organism talk
22:45 <+Dumont> OK, nemo.
22:45 <@SpaceHobo> I was thinking of something NNTPish but with web of trust 
                   stuff
22:46 < nemo> te last ime I thought about NNTP, it was as a possible front-end 
              (along with webforum, mailing list, etc) to a "headless" forum 
              system
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> yeah
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> I've been thinking of making a blog that is nothing but an 
                   rss feed
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> if you can find it you can add it
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> but I'm not going to make a full web site for it
22:47 < nemo> heh, ice
22:47 < nemo> nice
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> the problem: I have no desire to blag
22:47 < nemo> http://wiki.thorx.net/wiki/Forum
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> but yeah
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> I feel like we should take the good bits from nntp
22:47 <@SpaceHobo> but leave out some of the horrible flooding
22:48 <@SpaceHobo> instead of making it a flooding protocol, make it a cache 
                   consistency system
22:48 < nemo> cache consistent?
22:49 <@SpaceHobo> so instead of stuff like "1M limit for messages" you get 
                   "your local server on your laptop is set for each thread to 
                   be an MRU of size 50MB, and misses go out over t'internet"
22:49 <@SpaceHobo> "The server cache server you slave off of is set to 150MB 
                   per thread, and for everything else you just venture out 
                   over the cloud and grab individual messages"
22:49 <@SpaceHobo> or something like that
22:50 <@SpaceHobo> so conversations tend to exist where people are having and 
                   watching them
22:50 <@SpaceHobo> also you subscribe to people's reject feeds as well
22:50 <@SpaceHobo> so you can say "train my bayesian filter on sneakums's 
                   rejects" and you know you'll get a curmudgeonly view of the 
                   feeds
22:51 <@SpaceHobo> and it's all signed under the covers
22:51 <@SpaceHobo> and you can use your huge fancy keys to assert your ID
22:51 <@SpaceHobo> but the user-friendly defaults make it easier to roam
22:52 < nemo> *nods* 
22:52 < nemo> I like the sensibility of that
23:00 < nemo> and I think my "forum" frontend idea would mesh with that too
23:00 <@SpaceHobo> absolutely
23:00 <@SpaceHobo> that's part of the goals
23:00 <@SpaceHobo> anyway, I think linuxworld's forums used to be a web 
                   front-end to an NNTP server
23:00 <@SpaceHobo> partly because rick moen had a chat with them
23:01 < nemo> *nodnod*
23:05 <@SpaceHobo> and they offered you access to the NNTP
23:05 <@SpaceHobo> it was pretty sweet
23:06 < nemo> hmm
23:06 < nemo> I do tend to think, no doube naively, that a superset of NNTP as 
              it stands now would suit, and provide more or less suitable 
              compatibility
23:06 < nemo> well, superset of the message format anyway
23:06 <@SpaceHobo> yeah
23:06 <@SpaceHobo> rfc2822 style
23:07 <@SpaceHobo> basic structures like official thread support headers
23:07 < nemo> yup. thinking the same thing. multipart mime for messages
23:07 <@SpaceHobo> however I tend to object to the idea of newsgroups themselves
23:07 < nemo> more headers to track messages and so on
23:07 <@SpaceHobo> at the very least, cross-posting should be technically 
                   impossible
23:07 <@SpaceHobo> and threads themselves should be the unit of aggregation
23:08 <@SpaceHobo> I'm still at a loss as to how you really follow things
23:08 <@SpaceHobo> but maybe you could take a page from the notadoctors and use 
                   tagging
23:08 <@SpaceHobo> maybe just following *people*
23:08 < nemo> you follow a thread, and any threads that fork off that thread
23:08 <@SpaceHobo> have different recommendation engines
23:08 <@SpaceHobo> but yeah
23:08 < nemo> with the concept of a thread being independant to the subject line
23:08 <@SpaceHobo> and your tools can find joey hess taxonomies for the 
                   subthreads you're viewing
23:08 <@SpaceHobo> yep
23:09 <@SpaceHobo> totally
23:09 <+Dumont> like, toooootally!
23:09 < nemo> so a buynch of people on a thread... all automatically end up 
              following forked threads
23:09 < nemo> = "group"
23:09 <@SpaceHobo> in fact, the subject line for a reply should be blank
23:09 <@SpaceHobo> you get to type in your own subject if you want it
23:09 <@SpaceHobo> otherwise it isn't there
23:09 <@SpaceHobo> so there's none of this:
23:09 < nemo> multi RE :)
23:09 <@SpaceHobo> Subject: penis enlargement (Was: Re: herbal oxycodone)
23:10 < nemo> yes, and those
23:10 <+Dumont> and those are links, end of story.
23:10 <@SpaceHobo> so also, if you post a unique and precious message to the 
                   system, I'm not sure how people find it
23:10 <@SpaceHobo> unless you just make it part of the You Feed
23:10 <@SpaceHobo> and anchor it there
23:11 <@SpaceHobo> and people follow people, the way they do with the interblag
23:11 <@SpaceHobo> I think that would certainly help adoption, at least
23:11 < nemo> I think that would work
23:11 <@SpaceHobo> and you could even make it work currently over legacy 
                   structures like blogs and rss feeds
23:11 < nemo> the trick is finding what it is that make some things work as a 
              'community' and others not
23:11 <@SpaceHobo> although my preference would be that the official file 
                   format is plain text with markdown 
23:12 <@SpaceHobo> and the legacy stuff is all stubby html designed for one 
                   site's CSS
23:12 <@SpaceHobo> which makes aggregators do funny things right now
23:13 < nemo> I don't think an official file format is sensible
23:13 < nemo> define the way the message is containered, transmitted, etc. but 
              message body... up to the user
23:14 < nemo> (I realise this will mean it's likely to default to html+text 
              like email, with probably an even greater bias to html only
23:15 <@SpaceHobo> yeah
23:27 < nemo> ok. so how do we make this happen? :P
23:29 <@SpaceHobo> I'm not sure yet.
23:55 < nemo> mind if I copy the aforementioned notes (some might call it an 
              IRC log) onto my wiki?
23:56 <@SpaceHobo> no problem
23:56 <+Dumont> Like the man says, there are no problems, only solutions.
23:58 < nemo> I wont stop till my wiki is full of ALL the good ideas without 
              implementations
23:58 < nemo> gotto collect them all
23:59 <@SpaceHobo> haha