Coding continues on the replacement for this message board, ETA: late June or early July.As I've hinted previously, it's going to combine some useful features of forums with the ease of use and low resource utilization of a message board. There will need to be more categories than just the two we have now, obviously, but earlier RFCs have made it clear that we don't want so many as to cause confusion. On the other hand, recent activity in THIS current category demonstrate that one particular subcategory suddenly becoming very popular (like LWBC has, bless its very welcome li'l heart) can kind of swamp other topics that we'd also like to see more postings about. Being more forum like, the new system should make it easier to split or merge categories if or when needs change; so as long as I don't accidentally code myself into a corner somewhere, I'm not too worried about categories at the moment. We'll discuss them further before the big day, anyway.
But...there is also something else I've noticed lately, about I would especially like your timely comments!
Seems to me that some of the LWBC posts are of long-term interest, like discussions of historic stations, reception of rare signals, hardware/tech topics, etc., such as are typical of forums--while many are of short-term interest, such as band conditions on a given evening, the sort of thing that springs to mind in connection with chat rooms. That is, at least in those hobbies that have enough people to make live chatting viable! But what if there were a middle ground, maybe?
HOW ABOUT THIS, THEN: INCORPORATING A CHAT FORMAT INTO ONE OF THE FORUMBOARD'S MAIN LF CATEGORIES?
It would be like a chatroom in terms of simple and quick posting, but messages would remain visible and answerable for a week or more, and would self-archive for future reference. I envision reading chat posts in a browser page that behaves differently from the rest of the forum, allowing you to scroll, read and respond to existing messages as if they were in a plain regular forum, if you happen to be in the room alone. However, if someone else joins you in reading, either of you can initiate a sorta-live session. (I say 'sorta' because I don't like to push content in AJAX, so there will be a few seconds of latency.)
As with the rest of he forum, assume EVERYTHING you write will be visible to EVERYONE in the known universe, so use good sense.
Conversely, however, it may be necessary to limit posting in chats to only Authenticated Authors! Would that be too limiting? If we have do that, would it inconvenience anyone to have to log in with your Author credentials for every session? Or should we join the 20th century at last and start using cookies at lwca.net to keep from having to log in as often?
Or, if we want to keep posting to chats available to all, much as this board is with basic posting for all and expanded privileges for Authenticated Authors, we might have to very tightly limit size and content of chat posts when not using Author credentials. Otherwise the Spamb*stards will be all over our chat rooms like stink on rice, or white on a cheap suit. Any thoughts in how short would be too short?
All comments on any of these ideas, or any related matters I have (probably) overlooked, are welcome!
John Davis
