Microcosm Feature Suggestions

Philosophically sound theoretically
Took lynchmans fake death for many to realise his prank.
Took exactly a year.
Cleverer lynchmen could keep up a scam, a conciet for years

But at what point is the fraudster merely defrauding themselves?

They probably give themselves a good defrauding most evenings.

Glad the importance of user identity is being addressed
Although seems completely at odds with the content is king approach.

I'm not sure I agree.

For example, I don't know the identity of Smallfurry. But yet the value in something like the fat and long bike thread ( https://www.lfgss.com/thread79244.html ) is really high to the community and those interested in sustainable transport around the world.

The content value is high, and yet we didn't need to know Smallfurry's name and address for that content to have value.

Sure... some instances will arise in which arguments can be made for real identity (such as the recent Lynchman one). But those are the exception rather than the norm, and even though he largely attempted to obscure his identity he still had leaked enough that he wasn't anonymous.

It's really important to note that difference. We're not going for, or making any claims, that we will offer full anonymity. Instead we're offering a pseudonym. The ability to have some obscurity to your identity such that you can post more freely and so that you have the power to determine whether you wish to present your real identity or a constructed one.

I think this is even more important if you are one of the minority or oppressed groups. Not everyone is privileged enough to be middle-class, white and male, and it can be very hard for certain individuals to exist within a community without some physical or social attribute being used against them to exclude them. The pseudonymous approach allows those people to present their interest first and foremost and to be judged and accepted based on that interest rather than based on their identity, gender, race, wealth, etc.

And through such engagement, the whole community benefits from better content. And by content I don't mean the shit we talk most of the time, but those times when we actually add to the knowledge of the subject... Smallfurry's fat and long bike thread.

I guess translation to other languages are planned?

Yes.

Which makes it sound like we're doing it.

Which we may not be.

Part of the point behind the open source frontend is that once we've stabilised the design and phrases used in the localisation then we can allow anyone to submit or refine the phrases for other languages.

We may hire professional translators for a few languages to get us started, but it will be up to others to help provide the phrases for their preferred language.

And when we talk about localisation, we'll obviously only be changing the phrasing that we control, we aren't modifying content. We'll present a site in one language/locale but the data (comments, conversations, etc) are in whatever language people enter them in.

There's no localisation/translation of the data itself.

Yes, I kind of figured that it would be like that. Some sort of standard file with terms/words/frases that needs to be translated for a full foreign languaged experience?

Pretty much.

We're using Django for the front-end. There were lots of reasons for choosing Django, and one of those is the support for localisation: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/i18n/

Details here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/i18n/translation/

Is there any value to Microcosm in acting as an archive for now defunct sites? I'm thinking in particular about a site like serpentineroad.com, which was for years an active community but is now about to close. Would be nice to think that there is still some value in keeping such sites alive, but I wonder is there a commercial rationale for it?

We can do so, but someone will need to pay for it.

We have not yet begun testing our revenue model, but we have been given stark warnings by others in this space that there should be some revenue from sites and communities that by themselves cost virtually nothing but in quantity add up to be a significant cost for the company.

Horror stories from others in this space that tried to offer free forums and only charge above a certain point of traffic or some other method, roughly translate to "And then there were thousands and thousands of these small or dead communities".

Our original intent to make money off of transactions within a community is still intact. But we're shifting towards something that says "a small token payment each month" combined with "and if we earn above £x then we'll share profits with the community".

Where the monthly payment is a fiver, or something like that... and if you pay in advance for a year, maybe it's £50 rather than £60.

This is pathetically cheap, but creates a strong incentive for the admin to care enough about the thing they've created to pay for it. It will prevent a lot of spam sites being created too.

It also means, that if you want to archive a site on Microcosm you could... but there is a cost associated with that even if it's a trivial cost.

Is there anyway of auto locking old classifieds threads? There seems to be a lot of really old sale threads, some of them years old, getting bumped with "is XYZ still available?"

There isn't, but that's a good idea.

We haven't yet delved into the classifieds type, but an auto-expire is a good suggestion.

Profile photos - users should have somewhere to upload a profile photo of themselves and their bike.

This would also help as a soft identity control method.

Id also like to have the ability to click on peoples avatars and see a larger more detailed image.

Some members have interesting avatars but I'm not sure what the hell they actually show because of the sizing.

Profile photos - users should have somewhere to upload a profile photo of themselves and their bike.

This would also help as a soft identity control method.

Yeah, right.

Will there be rep on Microcosm?

Not sure yet.

There won't initially be an equivalent to the rep system here, but it's a weird system. I've always been unsure how it fits in. It's no good as a system to say whether a trader is good/bad, and it's no good as a system to indicate influential people, and it's no good as a messaging system, and it's no good as a chat system.

Until I figure out how it fits in, what the purpose of it is, I'm not creating it.

I want to get things right, to think about them from a fresh perspective... so with private messages it's about coming back to it and re-considering why they act like a broken form of email, how they could be better, more shareable (still private, but more as conversations where new people could be included), richer, more effective, easier to use. And those questions can only be answered by knowing why they need to exist, how much they're used, how people use them, etc.

I don't really know any of that about the rep system, and the use of such systems seem to vary greatly from site to site.

Some sites love those green pips, or the public karma score. Some make the comments public.

LFGSS is already a freak in that we hide most of it, including the scores, and treat it as a +1/-1 mechanism.

But for that, other forums have the concept of "thanks", where comments within a thread have names below them of those who thank the author of a given post, or in some cases those who names who think the post is a bad one.

Is our use of rep (our hacked version) not closer to that?

So should we take the rep and simply merge it with a publicly visible "People who think this post is good: sumo, Emyr" thing below a comment?

It's one of those really inconsistent things from forum to forum. And Microcosm needs to get it right, in a consistent way. We can't do that until we work out what the underlying essence of rep/karma is. We don't yet know that.

Interesting questions.
Charlie Brooker, in a program about gaming recently referred to Twitter as a massively multiplayer role playing game where everyone competes with their invented persona to gain more followers than others. Similarly facebook 'likes' and comments on updates. I suppose rep/likes/+1s/ all serve to create a degree of competition to everything. (Unlike ebay score which is about trust rather than popularity)

On here, the fact that all this is hidden from others means there is less of the game element, and less of a trust element since rep is awarded for anything rather than for good transactions. So rep's function is fuzzy yet it is still a powerful force here and is fundamental to this forums cultural identity. Since it has evolved with this forum it is difficult to pin this down in the architecture of a new generic forum software, yet probably ought to feature in a similar way when this forum moves to microcosm or a part of lfgss culture may get lost.
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(Now about tags...)

I like how the rep works now, if it's public it just becomes vulgar and intimidating to new members. I guess it's just like a hidden 'thanks' system, but I like how you can send a message with it too.
As an actual measure on how trustworthy a seller is it's pretty much useless, unless they're neg repped, but I was saying that from the beginning.

One other thought:
Post-counts here are visible and perhaps have a stronger gaming function here than rep (which is why hippy is so well liked:), and the play-off between quantity of comments versus their quality will also need to be considered for microcosm

Rep validates my life, everything I write is based on trying to attain little +1s, without it there would be a gaping chasm of darkness left in the very centre of my soul.

If all the +1/-1 were moved to the posts themselves, and that you saw at the bottom of a post a bit that said:

This post was liked by: Tom, Dick, Harry and 39 others
and was disliked by: Alice, Bob, Charlie and 2 others

Then there would be upsides to this...

People could see what type of post was liked by the community and try to contribute posts of that quality. Likewise, people could see what not to do by what does not meet the approval.

It could help a lot more in that regard, but it the downsides would be that it might act to only make those types of contributions be made. The circle-jerk metaphor made real. And that really would be a bad thing with regards to the bullying and mob culture, but then to some extent those people already use rep as it stands in that regard.

All of this is obsessing over the way LFGSS uses rep. The vast majority of forums actually use a public karma score and public green pips, public thanks on posts, etc.

The one thing I've always said about Microcosm is that it would be a new form of community software and not just another copying of existing forum. It should be the right thing for now and not just another echo of the past.

So whatever we build into it goes through this process of asking what we're trying to achieve, how it should work, what it does for different types of community, etc.

The hacks on vBulletin and LFGSS don't fit that at all. If there is a need we're missing I'd rather understand those than cargo cult a fix without knowing why we're doing it.

I don't want to see how many reps the terrible puns get, that would be really depressing.

Sumo's right, it's good how it's hidden. Back in the vanilla days, I did like how you could make a post visible just to one person. So maybe a twist on that mixed with the current system?

I used to have a friend at school who had a saying.
'Life is not a popularity contest.'
I used to think this was a good saying.. but I used to also think this was a stupid saying because life clearly is / if its anything a popularity contest.

However its a contest you can never be sure your winning.. this might be why allowing people to rep but hiding the score works.