The BBC has an opensource site at... http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/ My opinion: Thank you for calling our work "junk". I'm not sure that your assumption that the lower licence fee settlement means less money for Future Media (the dept formally known as New Media) will be true, given the corporation-wide push to overhaul its web services. J
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of vijay chopra Sent: 19 January 2007 13:36 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: Re: [backstage] crappy "have your say" forum I didn't mean to try and drag you into the car crash that was\is 6-0-6 (I already said that this was the wrong place to discuss it), I was just wondering if the messageboard software would be FLOSSed, so it's development was more like that slashcode. I'm a also regular reader of /., and they recently had a trial of the threading in "discussion 2.02", indeed, it's ongoing. The firehose also looks interesting: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl Whereas the BBC has just imposed developments from on high, and us users never get to look at the beta stuff to suggest improvements and developments.Sorry to go back to 6-0-6, but I was a so called tester for the new system, I had no way to communicate with the devs of the new system, just a layer of management who mostly ignored what I said anyway. Given that a recent EU study (http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/17/0113235 ) has shown the benifits of FLOSS, why can't the BBC monolith move to an open development system? Surely the BBC should lead the way in opening up it's internal proprietary junk, after all as a licence fee payer I've already paid for it, and not only am I willing to test it, I'm willing to submit bugs via an open bug tracking system a la bugzilla, and maybe even develop for it. What with the new licence fee settlement, it's a cheaper and better way to get things done. Personally the engine that's used in sports\celeb daq is something else I'd like to use. On 19/01/07, Jason Cartwright <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: You're not dragging me into that whole 606 thing :-) I was referring to threading as seen on www.slashdot.org (via slashcode), where a converation has a (seemingly) unlimited heirarchy of replies, rather than traditional messageboard threading based on user topic (as seen on 606). News' messageboards are from Jivesoft, 606 etc are done internally by DNA. Different systems. One little known requirement of the Have Your Say thing... http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/ws/thread.jspa?threadID=4895 (arabic) http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/ws/thread.jspa?threadID=4954 (urdu) http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/ws/thread.jspa?threadID=4958 (persian) http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/ws/thread.jspa?threadID=4959 (russian) http://newsforums.bbc.co.uk/ws/thread.jspa?threadID=4960&start=0&tstart= 0&zh=simp (chinese simplified) etc... http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/ J ________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&[EMAIL PROTECTED] co.uk> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&[EMAIL PROTECTED] co.uk> ] On Behalf Of vijay chopra Sent: 19 January 2007 11:48 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk <https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [backstage] crappy "have your say" forum On 19/01/07, Jason Cartwright <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > wrote: I'd imagine threaded conversations (which I think is what you are suggesting) are difficult from a usability perspective, as well as technically. Remember this system is probably the first time many users have used a messageboard, and this sucker needs to scale like crazy - given the large numbers bbc.co.uk pushes (2.5bn pages/month on average [1]), particularly when a big news story happens. That's not the reason at all, the BBC used to have a decent message board system (well an OK one) for it's 6-0-6 message boards, they've replaced it with a blog-like structure against the wishes of most of it's users. In his own blog, the sports editor, Chris Russell was forced to admit it was "too popular" and was being changed more or less to make it harder for people. A similar thing has happened to the today message boards, now only the hacks are allowed to post topics, not the users, this was also the first step in the destruction of the 6-0-6 message boards. The problem is one of a lack of good hardware, not a software one. Basically the BBC needs to beef up the servers that are hosting the message boards.
