Matt's questions/comments were academic.
I'm also not a fan of the Moderated board model, BUT can live with it because if someone doesn't like the way a board is moderated, they can create a new board.
I dislike the word "never" and am especially reluctant to apply it here when I'm still getting a handle on the whole beast, so can't really predict exact ways things will/won't change, but I don't intend to implement anything akin to iHub's CoB model here.
There are some broken things here (IMO) in terms of technological and philosophical approaches to being a message board, but this ship is largely in very excellent condition and there are many things that're under the umbrella of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" and deletion ability belonging only to an admin is definitely one of those things.
I think the CoB model does work well on iHub, although as traffic increases, the model's limits are going to get tested. It would NOT work here and will not even be tried.
So, consider this as coming straight from the horse's mouth (or whichever end each reader may equate me with): Users will never be able to delete posts here. Only I or any other admin that is hired will be able to do so.
I don't want to fool around with the content too much even on a site-wide scale except for the signal/noise ratio I'd discussed earlier. And of course in the specific manner I have to as an admin.
My first priorities are the technology and the business model.
I want to fix the technology the few places it's broken (Search is the main example), port it over to the ASP/SQL Server/Windows world I'm good in, add features until both iHub and SI have similar available features, then develop new features only once and be able to implement them on both sites.
On the business side, I want to open the site up (in a limited way that I haven't yet worked out all the details of) to free members, ditch the lifetime subscription model (while honoring existing ones, of course), replace it with recurring subscriptions, and add other revenue streams I'm not ready to discuss yet.
Though our long-range (at least a year, maybe two, out) plans do call for merging the two sites into one, that's far from set in stone. There are several major issues surrounding that, not the least of which is that I like appealing to twice as many different kinds of message board users.
Other than that, I'm not going to muck around with the place too much. It's lost marketshare to iHub, but it's been hanging in there just fine. It has its loyal userbase (myself included) and if I seriously thought iHub could continue to take its marketshare, we wouldn't have bought it.
SI will remain what it is in most respects and iHub will remain what it is, and they'll both be different sites that appeal to different people. |
