tighter integration of the website and forums.

DeVore

A couple of things about the forums:

1. You seem to be scraping the content (god only knows how). We should be able to make this much easier for you shortly as we are going to do some XML "last ten" scripts for all the communities.

2. We could alter the colours for the forum to sit a bit better with your site, though this will only help if you frame it in (no problem with that either).

3. Some people have been suggesting that having a public forum is a bad thing.
I cant say strongly enough that thats nuts. IOFFL sprung out of the coming-together of people from a number of different public forums including Usenet and Boards.ie
Yes its chaotic, yes it sometimes churns topics but from that wellspring of chaos you can pluck occasional gems of ideas.

99% of online discussion is venting and worthless. You dont do it for the 99%.

I think we could probably lock off an avatar of the snail or somemthing and restrict it to IOFFL offical reps to mark them out or something. Or maybe just alter their names to "[IOFFL] Bard" etc

DeVore.

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by DeVore:
A couple of things about the forums:

1. You seem to be scraping the content (god only knows how). </font>

Sorry, I don't understand what you mean

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">3. Some people have been suggesting that having a public forum is a bad thing.
I cant say strongly enough that thats nuts. IOFFL sprung out of the coming-together of people from a number of different public forums including Usenet and Boards.ie
Yes its chaotic, yes it sometimes churns topics but from that wellspring of chaos you can pluck occasional gems of ideas. </font>

Couldn't agree more with you - this forum has been the lifeblood of our campaign!

Yes it has faults, but how else could we have got such a high level of contribution from our members.

Also, having our debate in public like this is no bad thing IMO.

We now know that Esat, Eircom, ODTR and Dept of Public Enterprise read this board regularly (and in the case of ODTR, contribute occasionally).

This is a unique facility for them to 'feel the pulse' of real users. They might not like everything they see here and OK, there can be some offensive stuff posted, but that's the real world out there.

One thing that came across to me at the seminar is how little understanding Eircom in particular have of the real world, hopefully this forum can help waken them up.

Martin

LegacyUser

if your talking about me, i wasnt saying that a public forum was a bad idea, i show how open we are, i was just reminding people to watch what they say and to show abite more tact then otherwise would be demanded

LegacyUser

A public forum like this is a good idea (a bit like speaker's corner in London) and if some people do make some rather silly or annoying comments it is no big deal.

Some people who were rather annoying to begin with made a major effort to improve their behaviour (and we should comment them for this) and things improved very much as we approached the big event on Wednesday.

I do not believe that we should be over protective towards organisations such as Eircom, NTL and Esat ... it is about time that they understood that they are big boys operating in the real world.

The fact that a company such as Eircom could be unsettled by comments within this forum is a bit worrying and despite them claiming to be worried they did not act accordingly ... if you need proof just consider their presentation, if they had been in anyway sensitive to what was being said here they would not have adopted the approach that they did.

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by infomat:
The fact that a company such as Eircom could be unsettled by comments within this forum ....</font>

It's not worrying, it's comical and comtemptible. And anyone paying any attention to this kind of attempt to manipulate or intimidate a public campaign is making an enormous mistake. I advise people to say what they want in the way they want it - surely the last thing an internet campaign wants is to be involved in is censorship of discussion. If it does, except in the most extreme situations, then it will only open itself up to accusations of 'manipulating' posts to it's forum and that can open a very damaging can of worms indeed.

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by infomat:
Some people who were rather annoying to begin with made a major effort to improve their behaviour (and we should comment them for this) </font>

I second that.

Martin

LegacyUser

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by DeVore:
99% of online discussion is venting and worthless. </font>

Might be true in general but not in regard to this particular forum IMHO

Martin

DeVore

Yes, that was a generalisation.

"Scraping" is the act of automatically getting links from a site that isnt providing an easy way to do it. Dont get me wrong, I have no problem with it, in fact I was hoping to make it programmatically simpler for Bard

I'd love to know who the Eircom people are (I could find out but that would be bold).
I think its gas that they are tuned in here. Let them watch the public without a tele-answering droids between them and the anger.

DeV.