No direction home

Message ID: 391718
Posted By: panglozz
Posted On: 2006-07-16 16:15:00
Subject: No direction home

Can we list the alternative locales:
1. Y!SCOX-- prediction: gradual accomodation to the loss of recs and functionnality. Pros: huge and open lurker base disseminates new information broadly. Con: new format makes information virtually impossible to uncover.
2. IP-Wars -- Pro- established battle hardened site with significant internal archives. Con--(for me) overly busy home page and navigation system. Virtually no one has championed this site for grokwar reasons?
3. SCOXQ.com-- Pro-set-up and wideopen editorially, Con: no lurker audience, or search engine recognition
4. Usenet (C.U.S.M. or A.O.L.Caldera) Consensus: C.U.S.M has a resident population and shouldn't be invaded by the tom-foolery of the Yahoo monkeys. A.O.L.C is a dead backwater. No external audience, and virtually un-searchable
5. Y!TTLA -silly, Biff-baiting. It does have Yahoeuvre scraping it already, but recs are dead, so the primary filter is down. No external audience.
6. A new geek-log or forum software powered site (Deepdistrust.info or Backinfullforce.com have PHP credits to burn). No advantage over SCOXQ.com
7. Various other stock boards: Raging Bull, Lion, iHub, etc. Some of these have extant SCOX boards (mostly empty), most require registration, and have operational quirks.
8. Hack the new Y!SCOX-- a database that scrapes message #ID and title could operate in a tab or frame view as a msg listing with the newY!SCOX and provide the critical missing indexkey for cross referencing unlinked posts.
9. Google bomb SCOXQ or IP-Wars and get their search indexes to the top for SCOX related keywords-- this would bring the lurker audience up to near Y! levels.

Message ID: 391740
Posted By: al_petrofsky
Posted On: 2006-07-16 17:40:00
Subject: Re: No direction home

Panglozz writes:
> 4. Usenet (C.U.S.M. or A.O.L.Caldera) ... virtually un-searchable

"Virtually un-searchable"? All messages in alt.os.linux.caldera, going back to its creation in July 1995, are archived and searchable with the fast and powerful google search engine at groups.google.com.

I always would have preferred to post SCO-related information to a usenet group rather than a yahoo, geeklog, scoop, or whatever site.

Some of the many reasons: killfiles; gnus; failure-resistant and non-owner-dependant architecture; google archived & searchable; easily archived elsewhere as well; and likely to long outlive the SCO litigation, just as alt.suit.att-bsdi outlived the previous round of litigation and was available to be searched for this round.

Another reason (as I ranted about here in message #126862) is that through the miracle of text/plain support, you can post a wide variety of tabular data, with aligning columns!

And the big one: if you've just obtained some interesting document, you can simply post the full text of the damn thing, rather than split it into a million bite-sized pieces, or go to the headache of setting up a website for yourself.

Back in April 2004, I posted a couple SCO messages to comp.os.linux.advocacy and comp.unix.sco.misc. It was clear, though, that both were being used by other audiences. I considered re-newgrouping alt.suit.att-bsdi, which was rmgrouped in 1995, but I never got around to going to the trouble of working up a consensus for doing so on alt.config and trying to ensure that it got decent propagation again.

I didn't notice that alt.os.linux.caldera appears to be available, and already to have decent propagation. At least, it is available to everyone through http at groups.google.com, and nntp feeds are available through supernews.com.

So, that's where I'll be posting next time I have something to say about SCO.

Message ID: 391743
Posted By: panglozz
Posted On: 2006-07-16 17:56:00
Subject: Re: No direction home

Al quibbles:
"Virtually un-searchable"?

What I intended to say was the absence of 2003-6 lawsuit posting requires any internal reference to exit the usenet universe. This means sourcing is always abstracted to some degree, unlike Y! or GL which can refer internally to previous documentation. This is the same weakness as all other alternative forums, save IP-Wars.

I (uncharacteristically pessimistic) don't think the usenet strategy will ever achieve "critical audience".

Message ID: 391756
Posted By: jonathan_sizz
Posted On: 2006-07-16 18:26:00
Subject: Re: No direction home

<< archived and searchable with the fast and powerful google search engine at groups.google.com >>

Yes, indeed the Groups index outperforms the main index. But it's just a geek ghetto. One of our aims has always been to reward *casual* searchers (eg, the recent Cravath Google-trawl) with appropriate signal. That was and is the point of mirroring GL.

From the usability p.o.v I agree 100% with everything you say about the functionality of netnews readers.

What I'd like to do is a bot to automatically gateway all new Y!SCOX posts onto a.o.l.caldera. I'd try to get the date, poster name and threading right, and include a fake sig block with a link to the Y!profile and the appropriate Y! reply URL, so that someone reading the newsgroup can easily reply back to the new Y!SCOX as long as they have a Y! nym.

However, we still need a way to get the best of aolc from Usenet onto the Web. Plenty of niche sites do simply mirror particular Usenet groups. Unfortunately, *permanently* mirroring a mirror of Y!SCOX would look quite bad to the Yahoo legal department. It would need to be selective and/or done by a second volunteer.

I know some people and/or Yahoo might not like all this, but what the hell... you're a long time dead.

Message ID: 391779
Posted By: ColonelZen
Posted On: 2006-07-16 19:15:00
Subject: New Craptacular Board

Other than this one I mean.

http://www.zensden.net/boredz

Raw, butt ugly, barely usable. But it looks sorta kinda like the old Y board.

Lots of functions aren't working yet - Hey, leave me a TODO if you see any not in my todos.

I wrote this more out of irritation than expectation of use; but if so interested give it a shot, and we can discuss.

It'll be another week or so until I can publish the code ... it's reliant upon a library which a client has options on. I can separate out the functions I used, but it'll take a bit of time (and probably occasional board crashes).

Don't take this too seriously. It's just for fun and wondering what it takes (about two days).

-- TWZ

Message ID: 391800
Posted By: other_opinions
Posted On: 2006-07-16 21:29:00
Subject: Another option

http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=1911&pt=m

Slow as molasses right now, but some other Yahoo boards are fleeing there.

Almost an identical interface. Ignore lists, Recs, Chronological listing, Long Term Sentiment.

TOS is similar to Yahoo's. It says you grant them non-exclusive license to the stuff you post, but copyright remains with you. It also says you grant license for others to read.

Not sure what the search capability is like.

Reports on other fleeing boards are that Investor Village is getting overwhelmed by the diaspora but are adding capacity.

The RAMBUS Yahoo! board has fled there if you want to see one with some posts:

http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=3666&pt=m

It appears to be running IIS, so DDT will be happy.

The texts of these Yahoo Message Board posts have been licensed for copying and distribution by the Yahoo Message Board users "panglozz", "al_petrofsky", "jonathan_sizz", "ColonelZen", "other_opinions" under the following license: License: CCL Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0.