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You're right to say that Barbelith isn't the most fully-featured board, and you're right to say that we have significant problems that couldn't be fixed without incursions into the code. And of course, we've already established that I'm not really in the right place to be able to bring Barbelith up to the place it should be.
However, I would like to add some of my pointers to this discussion. GIven that I've been running a board to a greater or lesser extent now for over eight years, here's my two-penneth.
Most of the alternative boards you're proposing don't have good ways to screen people coming into the board. You guys don't think that's important now, but given that the board nearly fell apart dozens of times under the influence of trolls, that the board regularly decides it wants to eject people (and couldn't do so if membership was open, as they'd just sign up again), I think you have to seriously consider whether you'd be comfortable dealing with that stuff again. Unless you got someone to actually rewrite the board and extend it, you'd likely be just replacing one highly suboptimal situation with another.
We actually opened up the board for new members a couple of times in the past and pretty quickly everyone demanded I shut it down again. Too many people wandering off the internet, signing up, writing one stupid post and never coming back again. You guys all got furious.
Banning is a piece of functionality that the board clearly should have had for years, and I'm sorry that it's been left with me. I can't promise that we'll fix that any time soon. And yes, the new membership deal is pretty appalling. But again, you have to ask what you can actually accomplish out there. Running a board is a pretty thankless task in a lot of ways, and I'm not sure you'd find yourselves in a particularly better situation at the end of it.
Let me make myself clear. If people want me to shut down barbelith and point people towards somewhere else to continue the discussion, then I will do so. If people want the archives of posts (not pms, though) exported, then I will do so. I won't export user login names or passwords or anything like that though, so you'd have to lose some of that stuff. It would have to be an archive (I couldn't compromise people's privacy by doing something like that).
I just want you guys to seriously think beforehand how you'd deal with the problems that we deal with here and recognise that if it was as easy as installing an off-the-shelf board and moving everything from here into it, I'd probably have done that years ago. WE started off in off-the-shelf software, after all. |
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