categorization: I see, in theory, the use of a central
categorization scheme. Often, however, the categories only
make sense inside a particular forum. For example, inside the
OpenACS 4.x forum, we might have the categories "design",
"backwards compatibility", "sample code", "documentation".
These categories are pretty specific to OpenACS 4.x and
wouldn't apply to say, photography if we also had a discussion
forum about that. Michael - and others - maybe you've already
thought about / solved this problem?
It's absolutely true that categories can need to be local rather
than global sometimes. So you'd need some sort of scoping
mechanism in your categories system and really, you'd need to
be able to scope not only specific categories but entire
taxonomies to do it right. It seems to me that this conversation
has come up before under the guise of keywords, but I couldn't
fully follow the technical ins and outs so I may be mistaken.
FWIW, though, even the examples you gave above may be
better scoped globally--not across bboard instances, but across
packages. It would be nice, for example, to have a portlet that
shows all bboard posts, file-storage docs, and wimpypoint
presentations relevant to "backwards compatibility" (particularly if
those items in the portlet could be filtered or ranked by their
aggregate user rating).
CR and versioning: there's one good point here - if we
allow editing of posts, we *must* allow versioning, and actually,
we should technically allow users to view old versions of posts
(otherwise the stream of discussion might make no sense and
make someone look like a fool for responding to an issue that is
no longer there). How do people feel about this editing issue? It
seems to bring up far more problems than it solves....
I'd want editing. Despite the post confirmation screen after
clicking the "submit" button, people still pull the trigger to soon
sometimes. You can say "too bad, you had your chance" but I
would hesitate to take that position unless the performance
penalty you'd pay for it is pretty significant.
