Forum Overview :: The Elder Scrolls :: Blog me a river

[quote name="Entropy Stew"][quote name="Zseni"]Not as long as I'm here, bringing down the general level of discourse. What I want is a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page">Wikipedia</a> full of Caltrops posters, with everyone having the same ability to edit each others' posts and manifesting articles and forums alike in a conglomerate which individual users differentiate for themselves (this person answers "articles" with "articles," this other one uses "talk"; another posts "articles" and "talk" alike to "article" pages, etc. Articles branch off each other; people post reams of chat logs as addenda to articles or to comments of articles, etc. etc. etc.) (But divide the articles into pages.) If there were a Caltropsian wikipedia, my belief that Caltrops is an RPG would be fully implemented (forced on others) by turning content creation and forum chatter alike into a massive round of <a href="http://www.nomic.net/">Nomic</a> a la miasma, with video games and fag jokes as strange attractors. Instantly. Since all the rules would have to be made live and modified by those who follow them. The new forum overlord is not a person, it's the developing ruleset (weak, socially-enforced limiter) and the limitations of the technology at hand (strong arbitrary limiter.) Well I'm just interested in seeing how the community develops itself. How quickly is it decided that there must be some unchangeable documents, how soon will someone appoint himself to the office of sherrif, whether a decision is made to route around a crazy sherrif or to fall in under him, how interested people can stay in the political day-to-day, what gets fought over. Wikipedia supports itself (internally, as a group project or community) by having a purpose; cutting it loose from that purpose and the laws built up to protect that purpose would be an awesome spectacle of human behavior. I got my panties in a wedge over the Purple Junta and the Crazy Admin; I have my panties in a wedge now that, because of the design and publishing structure, ICJ has to make time to make edits for people perfectly capable of editing their own articles. I won't be fully happy until there are no differences between forum and content besides self-assigned ones, and no differences between admin and user at all. Sticking points: someone has to be the site contact. The massiveness of the proposed system smothers itself without an actual purpose to inflate it. People are generally content with the current system with ICJ as Real Admin and BDR in some nebulously threatening Forum Cop (stuffing donuts down his beleaguered craw, reading posts obsessively to justify his titular badge) role. Nothing intelligent can ever be discussed at Caltrops.[/quote] I had this idea months ago, though without your crazy communist agenda attached. I would love to see some sort of content management system like you propose, where IMs can be inflected as posts and posts can be cast as articles and everything links to everything else in a most sublte manner and the robot hookers throw posies into the air and dogs spontaneously combust in time to the music. I invite you to implement a system that can handle such generics - might I be so bold as to suggest that you purchase a book on XSLT? I might! -/ES/-[/quote]