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Discuss Amongst Yourselves
The beginning of thought is in disagreement -- not only with others but also with ourselves.
-- Eric Hoffer
Wednesday, October 6, 1999
New by me on Epinions.com: reviews of the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, one of my favorite little computer utilities, and the Austin Powers original soundtrack. I cover the waterfront! Are you thinking about joining?
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I think that wanting easy access to the movie writeups (an exaggeration to call them reviews) that I did during the Film Festival this year prompted me to get on the stick and actually construct the index to SIFF 1999. In 1998 I took care of this soon after the festival, I see. There's something very soothing to me in building a page, looking up the links and sorting them by date or name. Rereading the entries gives me nostalgia -- for May and June of this year!
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I've been reading the discussion forums at Metajournals. I think the UBB format is a good one! There's a free version, and a pay version with more features. I've liked it on most sites that use it, and it seems to scale well, even to very high traffic levels. The discussion seems to take a slightly different path than on the journal-related mailing lists I'm subscribed to.
The Straight Dope boards are probably the highest traffic that I've seen. I haven't posted there; I haven't even really dug deep! The Straight Dope column seems entertaining, but I've never read a newspaper that carried it on a regular basis.
Hissyfit Forum is also very active. I think they have a policy of locking old threads after a certain amount of time, but I'm not sure why! The discussion is lively. They have a section just for discussing stupid people! I think Gwen of Gwen's complaints and dronings posts here (but now she calls her journal "Gwen's Petty, Judgemental, Evil Thoughts" -- what a great name!). I know that she writes some funny stuff for the site!
The first UBB forum I found was at Yehoodi.com. Lively swing dancing discussions, so you know I read it every day, and post there fairly often.
I've seen this software used a few times where it didn't really work, but that was because there really wasn't enough traffic to the site to sustain it. That's true for almost any kind of interactive forum, I think. If the owner doesn't participate, kicking things off on a regular basis, and there aren't other people posting, joking, debating, then you have these ghost forums. Check back in a week, and no new posts!
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