Topic: The State of Overwritten.net

[K-man]

Now that the site has been wrested from Antares' grasp (no offense, but getting OW back up obviously wasn't a priority of his), I think it would be a good time to talk about adding some upgrades to the site.  We've discussed this in IRC a little bit.  One of my suggestions was an actual front page banner and integrated IRC chat.  I'd like to see the integrated chat especially because I think we'd get a lot more traffic in the room (which is real fun!) if we had an easy way to get to it.

Of course some more grandiose ideas were tossed around.  They are good, but let's be realistic.  The chances of this site growing to a large population is near zero.  And personally I'm fine with that.  In fact the casual atmosphere and easygoing nature of this forum is a major part of what kept me here.  And I don't think we should lose that at all.  I'm a member of other forums that are much more populated (and that is good for other reasons), but I keep coming back here because honestly I believe we can have much more reasonable conversations here.  At least for the most part.

So if someone with the know how (Cools, for one) would be willing to devote some time to the site, what are some of the things you'd like to see implemented?

[Quemaqua]

Good post. I'll think about this when I'm... uh... sober. I know we've discussed some things, but I'll think about it some more. I'm fully on board with the IRC integration idea, though.

[idolminds]

FREE PONIES!


<---sober

[shock]

IRC integration would be awesome.  Then I'd remember to check it more often.

Beyond that, I think this site works great.  I can't think of anything else we would need.

[Cools!]

Thus far I haven't seen many great PHP based IRC clients, but I'll keep on looking. I do know of one Python based client that seems really robust but would need to check if the server supports it. I could always code something manually, it's not too hard, but if there's a package that'd save a lot of time.

Is there an interest in having articles on the site? The idea I had was to create a sub-forum for posting articles. I can work on a script that looks at all the threads in that forum and all those that are marked as "approved" (by moderators) would appear as links on the front page. We can work from there on adding more functionality. Thoughts?

[Quemaqua]

Not a bad idea.

[Cools!]

Front page has been updated. There's now an extra option to go to a webclient to connect to our IRC channel.

[Cools!]

There's also now an "IRC" button in the forum menu (right next to "Forum").

[ren]

Cool! Maybe I'll finally try out this IRC thing now that it's so accessible. Although I do enjoy the slow pace and permanence of the board so we'll see how it goes. Either way, thanks for all the work you're putting into the place!