Brainstorming Forums 2.0

Wirebird is "webforums 1.0, fixed, with a real mailing list back end." But I'd really like to make it (web) Forums 2.0. Which doesn't mean slapping Ajax on it, in this case.

You Own Your Words

Blogs have been described as "Usenet inside out." They're based around people, rather than groups. What if Wirebird groups were (in part, at least), virtual groupings of blogs?

Gedankenexperimentation

Let's take the Phoenyx group GAMERS. It has a few active members, who mostly have their own gaming-related blogs (me included), and a few less-active members who reply occasionally, and a whole lot of lurkers. How can I pull the blogs into GAMERS?

For example: I post something in my Livejournal. It's not a roleplaying-specific journal (in reality, it's my dumping-ground for things I want to say but that aren't really on-topic anywhere else), so I tag my roleplaying posts somehow. LJ conveniently provides a pre-filtered feed for this.

Perhaps there's a ping, or perhaps Wirebird just polls periodically, perhaps both, but one way or another, Wirebird picks up the LJ feed, sees a new post, and behaves as though I've just emailed it to the majordomo or entered it in a web form. It mails it to the email subscribers, adds it to the GAMERS feed, and so forth.

People reply. Some of these are what I'll call comments: the sort of thing you leave at the end of a blog post. They're trivial enough they might even be anonymous. But let's say Tim is inspired (as he has been in the past) to write a blog entry of his own, in response.

Tim runs a Wordpress blog on his own site. It's also got a feed, though I think not category-specific ones, so Wirebird will have to filter on the tags embedded in the RSS. Here's a first snag, though: how does Wirebird match up Tim's post as a response to mine? There are several solutions, none of them universally workable - trackback pings, various link embedding schemes, and so forth. We'll assume that's done, one way or another, or else that we accept that Tim is starting a new thread (which is probably okay, if it's significant enough to justify being something other than a comment anyway).

Both Wordpress and Livejournal (and Blogger, and many others these days) provide comment feeds as well, so Wirebird could pick up the comments on Livejournal and Tim's site and treat them as though they were more (semi-anonymous) comments posted on the original site. So far, so good.

Drawbacks

The biggest problem is the same thing that's happening with blogs right now: making sure replies get back to the author of the post, response, or (perhaps) comment. Say somebody replies to my Livejournal post. The comment gets picked up by Wirebird, and a GAMERS email subscriber replies. I have no way (that I know of) to syndicate Wirebird back into my LJ - though Wirebird happily provides a feed for individual threads.

Vulnerabilities

Which is to say: spammers.

I'm assuming that I (as moderator of GAMERS) decide who gets to be a "blogging member." I will probably have to be able to decide whether I trust the member's software enough to also syndicate his comments. And if he's syndicating Wirebird back into his blog somehow, he has to trust my trust. It's vulnerable to things like using a splog to gain access to a group, and then spamming that group.

Sadly, spammers have a lot more financial incentive to find these vulnerabilities than I do.