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Subject: 
Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.general
Date: 
Tue, 7 Jun 2005 21:46:28 GMT
Viewed: 
814 times
  
In lugnet.general, Joe Strout wrote:
I suppose, but in that direction lies scope creep, which can kill an
open-source project deader than just about anything else.

Oh, mainly I was thinking in terms of expansion making the network stronger. If
it's more generic, other communities will use it, and possibly add features,
optimization, and potentially even bandwidth.

A good point.  As for moderation, I was thinking that we could build in a
sort of rating system, with the tyical 1-5 stars, *plus* two more choices:
"off-topic" and "blatantly inappropriate".  These would be aggregated and
users could choose to ignore anything marked off-topic or inappropriate by a
certain percentage of viewers.  That should discourage abuses of the system,
though couldn't completely eliminate it.

Hmm... Yeah, if users can categorize data in a limited fashion it's a potential
help. Maintaining that via the network is difficult, since a stale copy wouldn't
have up-to-date info, but if all the indexing is stored centrally, that solves
that. Propagating things slowly works, but isn't quite as effective.

Rather than "off-topic", I'd just let people set their default options to "Lego"
(or perhaps make "Lego" the universal default when coming in through a certain
page on the central server). Then, when searching that area, again, you just
default "Lego" to be a keyword.

Well yes, that's the whole idea.  I'd propose writing the viewer in
REALbasic, which is easy and powerful, and can compile directly for MacOS,
Windows, and Linux with a native UI on each.

Huh. Don't think I've even heard of RealBasic. Some sort of cross-platform
language like Java was meant to be?

Isn't that effectively MOCPages?

Maybe.  I don't know much about it either, and when I tried to check it out
today it wasn't available.  (And still isn't now, I see.)  I had the vague
impression that images are actually stored at MOCPages, and that perhaps it's
also feeling the bandwidth strain.  But I could be way off there.

MOCPages is basically the idea of a central indexer. People host their images
elsewhere, and write page content on MOCPages. So each "page" is intended to be
dedicated to a particular MOC, with some limited HTML formatting, probably
similar in nature to LUGNET FTX. I think each MOC has associated categories and
whatnot, and also room for web visitors to rate and comment on particular
pages/MOCs.

It's been out for a while because the site owner left on a worldwide vacation
recently, and won't be back for another month or whatnot.

Yes, perhaps so.  But is it open-source?  If the maintainer of MOCPages
should get trapped under something heavy, can the site carry on?

Nope! But effectively, it's the same idea-- a central index site where
everything's stored. And as far as that idea goes, I'm not sure how it would be
any different making it open source, since a central index isn't really
"community-run".

I kinda wonder if you could combine the two.

Of course, it'd be more work to develop, requiring both a web server and the
BrickTella app.  But it's certainly worth considering.

Yeah. It'd be a pain to write. And I don't know much about writing webservers
themselves. I'm that step below where I know how to use and configure
webservers, but not write them. But provided it ever got off the ground, then
woot! It'd function pretty much the same as BrickShelf for all intents and
purposes UI-wise. The bandwidth would just be shared-- and there'd be (probably)
a much lower level of attention needed on the central server side.

Admittedly, though, the central server would still be the limiting factor. If it
DID get bogged down, then ... ? It would be single-point-of-failure from a web
perspective, although still *usable* from a non-web-client perpsective (although
only "pull" requests would work if the central server went down-- nothing new
would get added to the system).

DaveE



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
 
(...) Well, that's a fair point. But it still makes me nervous -- pretty soon you could have people pulling it in several different directions, and morphing it into something that's not really ideal for our purposes anymore. (...) Heh, if you (...) (19 years ago, 8-Jun-05, to lugnet.general, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Musings on an open-source Brickshelf replacement
 
(...) I suppose, but in that direction lies scope creep, which can kill an open-source project deader than just about anything else. (...) A good point. As for moderation, I was thinking that we could build in a sort of rating system, with the (...) (19 years ago, 7-Jun-05, to lugnet.general, FTX)

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