In no particular order... >>>The correct way to do discussion lists has never really been mail or web, but news (NNTP). This way everything stays under its own thread, and no-one has to download the whole page of forum discussions to get the one extra message at the bottom. An idea, but I suspect no-one would move.
I agree... The threaded nature of NNTP (And the forum!) is what makes it so desireable... I agree that the offline nature of NNTP is appealing as well... >>>Also, when the forum was first announced, it was never actually decided what would happen with regard to "copyright" on the messages. The discussion trailed off with some people saying that they wouldn't post to a forum which claimed copyright, but no-one ever stated that the forum wouldn't do just that. Perhaps there can be some belated clarification on this? All somebody has to do is write up a legal-sounding copyright statement and I will integrate it into the forum... Our policy now is nobody owns the content... I guess that makes it public domain... Anyways, the only reason there isn't a copyright statement is because I am not a lawyer so I wouldn't know what needed to be said... I'm certain somebody out there has experience in this area... While it is easy to view this situation as a sinister plot, the truth of the matter is quite simple and benign... :) >>>Also, what do we do about archiving material (simple for a list)? If the forum goes down is that the end of all the postings? I do a backup every two days... Recently, we lost around three days of posts due to a corrupt backup/restore cycle, but other than that fiasco the forum has been 100% reliable... Anyways, if I strip the security stuff from the database (MySQL) then I could just give the database away as a giant archive... It is on my to do list! Right now the database is around 17MB uncompressed... I've viewed the forum in myphpadmin and it is just a pile of text records... Extracting the info to be manipulated would be trivial for a MySQl or database expert... >>>What about posting (a digest of) forum messages on the list, a la SourceForge? Show me how to do this and it will be done... We have a mail server set up as well... The forum code is fully available to look at... Just go to http://www.phpbb.com/ to see it... The forum software is easily patched with "mods" to add functionality... I made the mistake initially of installing a pile of modes, which made upgrading difficult, but I'm sure I could handle one or two... The only disadvantage about making the forum accessable in places other than the forum is it encourages people to just read and to not participate... The whole purpose of the forum is to increase participation and discussion... While I don't want to do away with the mailing list, I see the mailing list better suited to announcements, but that is my vision of things and not necessarily what George has in mind... If the forum stuff was posted to the mailing list, then people would reply to it here, and that would certainly complicate things, but I'm willing to do whatever is best for the project... (If the consensus was that the forum was a bad thing I would kill it instantly!) >>>Having been an Internet user for > 20 years, I think "store & forward" rather than "instant messaging". That's my problem, not yours. Hey, I'm as old school as anybody, but things change I guess... The advantages to a forum far outweigh the disadvantages... You have private messanging (Which gets used a *lot*!), threading, inline images, email notification, instant searching and blazing speed, and that is just the tip of the iceberg... I posted here last night in the mailing list and it took a *long* time for my message to appear... A lot of the discussion on the forum is near real time... When you log in you can see who else is logged in, which I find to be kinda fun... >>>In short, the very concept of a web forum (where you have to do everything via the web, rather than using a dedicated application for it) just isn't that appealing to most people who have used e-mail or news for a while. The fact that most forums are extremely poorly designed userfriendliness-wise (note that I'm not very familiar to the GIMPS forums, so don't take this as a critique of the GIMPS forums in particular) doesn't help, either. :-) As I mentioned before, I'm an old school type guy myself, but you have to understand that our target audience is not us, but the newer generation on kids, to whom NNTP and email are foreign concepts... Not to get sidetracked, but to be utterly honest, the reason TPR has been so successful is because we have geared our entire structure to cater to the 15-35 year old age group... I can't tell you how many times I have had to modify my approach away from what I consider to be optimal to cater to the members of the team, but in the end, that is what keeps participants participating... Note that we have close to 7000 years of work in LL and over 1000 years in factoring... 90%+ of that is *new blood* to the project and not old fogies! This is in spite of us using a client and stats system that works but is certainly not plug and play... Hell, I just want a CLI client like Glucas or Mlucas, and I have no use, myself, for PrimeNet, but everyone I know is screaming for something akin to what SOB has... Oh yeah, we are first place in SOB, too... :) If the GIMPS stats were more modern and pretty, and team oriented, and if the client was plug and play (Dumbed down), I predict I could pull *another* THz into TPR in just a few months, but the perceived learning curve and lack of SOB/SETI style stats turns away a *lot* of participants... I know, because I lose recruits *every day*... Not one or two here or there... *All the time!* So the real discussion becomes "Do we stay static and cater to the people who are already here, or do we change for (Hopefully!) the better and go mainstream?"... Tough call! So, where does this leave us? Assume the forum is worthless and unusable... If someone has a fix or a solution, let me know... While ideas are encouraged, solutions are even better... I literally spend my entire day working on GIMPS-related crap, and I can barely keep up with the workload I have now, so if someone wants to volunteer to do something that would be fine... I take a lot of heat for the perception that the forum is "owned" by TPR... I've steered the forum away from any discussion mentioning TPR and I think we have done a good job at this... The URL is still wrong, but until Brad can make us a zone off of mersenne.org we are stuck with it... My pervading thought in every decision is not "What is best for Mike?" or "What will benefit TPR the most?"... It is "How can I make GIMPS a better place?"... Tonight we are testing out IRC to see if that is a viable medium for GIMPS... I suspect it is since it works so well for TPR and I suppose keeping an IRC channel open is trivial... I'm certain that a lot of the older folks will frown on a "chat room", but again, this isn't about us old timers, it is more about bringing in new blood... Other DC projects have ballooned in size compared to us, and I think we have the ability to grow as well... We just need to look at other projects to see what works and what doesn't... Natural selection at work, folks! In the end, I'm with GIMPS for two reasons... One, to find a Mersenne prime, and two, to socialize with other like-minded individuals... I think of GIMPS not as a distributed computing project but as a community of people... Anyways, I've yakked too much, as usual... Flame away! _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
