Author: Graham Laight
Date: 09:26:27 08/25/04
Go up one level in this thread
On August 25, 2004 at 11:40:33, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>On August 25, 2004 at 11:13:48, Steven Schwartz wrote:
>
>>Hi Everyone,
>>First of all, thanks for all the kind words about my company. Although there is
>>one person who seems to feel that we run CCC/CTF off ICD bandwidth - which we do
>>not, and believes that the message board brings us lots of customers - which it
>>does not.
>>
>>As far as the issue about hosting CCC (and CTF) is concerned....
>>I took a quick count of the responses to the choices I laid out. Here are the
>>results (wasn't easy to count since some people made no specific letter choice
>>but rather made general comments), at least as far as members who posted their
>>choices as of now:
>>
>>12 a) some other organization can take over the responsibility of hosting
>> 4 b) CCC and CTF can be disbanded and members can rejoin the USENET
>>44 c) members can pay a yearly fee to belong
>> 5 d) members can voluntarily contribute
>>
>>There were, as usual, many, many differing opinions about how to fix the
>>problem, but I thought Ed posted about the issue most eloquently:
>>
>>"Think about the work involved, first the daily work of making the archives, the
>>complaints by email about moderation issues, the legal threats some people make
>>when they are banned, can the person really stand the heat, or will be shut down
>>the website? Then the work involved regarding 2 mod elections a year. Then so
>>now and then the site will go down, suppose the person is on vacation or ill?
>>
>>Here is some more, the person fells in love, priorities change, goodbye with the
>>forum. People move to other cities, get a new and very busy job, people get
>>sick, become a father, change priorities all the time -> there goes the forum
>>again. The end result is so predictable.... CTF will run from pillar to post, 2
>>times a year at least.
>>
>>Wanna bet?
>>Ed :)"
>
>I would agree with Ed here. I host a hugely busy ftp box here that everyone
>uses for endgame tables. It is a pain. It is not free. And it takes work. If
>you look at the various private things done around the net, they are "here today
>there tomorrow" deals. CCC doesn't need that.
>
>How to solve this is a problem. Pay for access will probably be the death knell
>as only a few dedicated types will pay. And it will waste away over time.
>Having some private person host it will probably be the death knell. They will
>move, lose interest, or whatever. Every time CCC moves it will lose followers.
>
>I've been trying to think of how to host it here, but no real solutions yet, as
>it does take time and effort and hardware...
This is a huge, fundamental problem for the whole area of web forums - and one
which will have to be worked out over the next decade or so.
In the case of usenet forums, Google seems to have solved it by doing it on such
a large scale that the cost of storing/retrieving individual posts can be
covered by putting simple "context sensitive" text box adverts by each message
retrieved.
In the long term, I foresee the following happening:
* only companies that host a HUGE number of forums will be able to do so
cost-effectively (since they can reduce the cost of managing individual posts to
a negligable amount)
* they will have to offer a high proportion of forum features that groups will
want (e.g. CCC style of moderation) for selection by the forum owner
* eventually, they will have to find ways of dispensing with an owner altogether
- allowing members themselves to control the whole thing democratically
* special features (e.g. CCC chess diagrams) will have to be served from
elsewhere: this could be achieved by having a "chess diagram server" somewhere
on the WWW. Then, istead of looking like this:
[D]{chess position}
the chess board insert in a post would look like this:
http://www.chesspositionserver.net/{chess position}
Anyway - having done all that crystal ball gazing, my position on what ICD
should do right now is basically to retain ownership of the groups, but move
them to a different host, to remove most of their costs.
There are hosts (I believe) who will host forums, but allow you to create the
illusion that they're actually within your own web site (e.g. using frames). I
would transfer the forums to such a host. I am sure that Tim could work out how
to serve chess diagrams from an ICD server in the above format.
If this means some loss of moderation power, then we'd have to become more
creative about how we do moderation. Whatever the restrictions, we can amend the
rules to account for them.
If ICD at some point decide to give up the forums altogether, it's then a simple
matter of transferring these hosted forums to new owners.
-g
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