Bulletin Board

[Robert Whitlock]

Woo this is fancy! Great job on the bulletin board, Ian!

[Dave Eilers]

Yes, let's give that a try. I reversed all forums except the TESC one. Rich can do that or ask me to. Do people like this better?

no.

[Ian Ferguson]

Yeah, I like it because I keep up to date on things.

It also seems to work better on long topics with lots of posts, but seems odd on topics with only a few replies. I was getting annoyed with having to click through to the last comment in the long thread. I can see the advantage to both ways of sorting. The standard for forums like this is to do the oldest first, so we should probably go back to that, but let's try this for a short while and see if we get other comments.

[Rich Coker]

This might be great if you're fully up to date on a conversation... but for anyone who is new to a topic (like any new registrations would be), this is wildly confusing and pretty counterintuitive. Having to scroll down to see what was already said, and then come back up to get to the more recent posts? Even using the quote feature, this seems pretty backwards.

Using the 'View posts since last visit' option and selecting the most recent page is much less mind-breaking.

I blame gmail. Gmail made top posting seem like it was a good idea.

[Elizabeth Drake]

Beth

[Ian Ferguson]

Yes, let's give that a try. I reversed all forums except the TESC one. Rich can do that or ask me to. Do people like this better?

[Elizabeth Drake]

Is there any way we can get the new stuff to post at the top of the page instead of having to scroll down to the bottom? Just wondering...plus, I just wanted to post another message to test this out. I can't believe you won't tell us who Handblocker is!!! Iso on Sunday for sure.

Beth

[Jon Price]

Laugh all you want, but how hot would that have been had she shown up?

[Rich Coker]

I'm not really trying to push this as hard as it seems, but I remembered something else as well.

Before we started requiring [firstname lastname], we weren't able to identify and prevent spambots from registering and posting nonsense on the bboards. It began leading to a decent bit of work for moderators and admin. Perhaps the software has gotten better since those days, though I don't recall there being any sort of picture-word-generation measures in place in the registration process.

Of course, Jon does need to be able to invite spambots to play as women on teams now and again, so perhaps this is really a reason against.

[Ian Ferguson]

Oh, crud. I forgot I was logged in as Admin. This will occur occasionally. I mean to log in as me when posting.

Ian

[Admin]

Having names as usernames seems like an important rule. Without accountability people have a tendency to misbehave more.

A philosophical examination of this effect can be found here.

Peace out.

Nice, Dave. I may be proven wrong, and it hasn't always been true and it may not be in the future, but right now, I think the flaw in the linked equation is that we don't have any normal people.

[Admin]

Yes, let's do a poll in a couple weeks or so.

Anyhow, I just now learned that Admins can look up the email of each user. So, if you want to really, really be anonymous, you'll have to create a new gmail account or something.

Still, until the poll, I'm not telling who Handblocker is.

[Rich Coker]

If you've already registered, you can change your username by editing your profile, so there's no need to reregister if you've already done so. Of course, this also makes the practice fairly unenforceable sans flat out kicking someone off the entire bboard, which no one wants. It's really just a measure that (imho) makes conversations a bit more productive since you know who's talking, and helps new folk who might not know everyone yet place a name and face on who they're getting to know.

But ultimately, I'll leave this call to y'all. Perhaps a poll when more folks have registered?

[Dave Eilers]

Having names as usernames seems like an important rule. Without accountability people have a tendency to misbehave more.

A philosophical examination of this effect can be found here.

I'd include it inline, but it involves some indelicate language.

So instead I'll include this one:


Peace out.

[Ian Ferguson]

It's actually not a rule of mine, but a suggestion of Rich's. I haven't made it a rule yet, because I hadn't gotten around to it, but now I'm wondering if we need it at this point. I believe that it can be implemented at a later date, as soon as we become as contentious (and successful) as Pittsburgh.

I like the mystery, so long as Handblocker behaves him/herself. I think it's Andrew, too. I'm sure that as soon as we call it from the stack we'll find out for sure.