Replies to post #66 on The iHub Wish List (IWISH)

[Koikaze]

Mawnin', Milk

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you (and Matt) are suggesting. It appears you mean we should have a new board where copies of good posts are kept. If that's the idea, I can't say it lights my fire. Here's why:

1) We already have a "Top IHUB Posts (TOPPOSTS)" board. The last message was posted on it on 5/20/2002 at 10:49:34 PM. I'm not certain a modified version of the same idea would be any more successful.

2) The issue I'm addressing (which may not be the one you and Matt are addressing) is how to deal with the large number of posts on a board the reader is interested in. I'd like to reduce the need to thumb through a multitude of posts, seeking those worthy of attention.

If you create a board for good posts from all boards, you make the problem worse. There are excellent posts on religion, on guns, on old folks, on politics, on myriad other topics that interest many people ... but they do not have universal appeal. To put all those posts together on a single board is to bury them.

The concept of a "board" is to provide a place for people of a like interests to congregate. As the congregation grows, more and more extraneous information is discussed. We already have a way to view everything the preacher says. What we need is a way to identify the excellent comments of others (who may not be known to us).

When one goes to a board header, the system presents a list of the last 50 posts, with the option to review more. The list shows: Post Number, Subject, Posted By, and Time Posted. One possibility (but not the best) would be an additional column which contains a tally of the times a message has been marked by a reader. The marking would be done, as you suggest, by adding a "Mark" option near where the "Keep" option appears.

There are at least two down sides to the idea.

1) The childish vandals who disrupt boards by posting frivolous messages can be relied on to distort the mark counts.

2) As soon as the idea is implemented, we will be asking Bob for the ability to scan messages which have more than (a variable number of) marks.

None of this is to say the idea of providing a means for newcomers to get the full flavor of the diversity available to them at iHub is not a good one. It is. But it is not the idea I was talking about.

Fred