Okay, I honestly didn't mean to take over stakeholders with a features
discussion. In a week or so, I'll have the Gamehawk forum over on
Wirebird divvied up into gearhead discussion (which it almost-entirely is
right now) and other sections for ordinary mortals on bug reporting (we'll
need a lot of this) and wishlisting.
However, I wanted to mention something I've just discovered in Vanilla
that would be shockingly easy to implement in Gamehawk: whispering.
Vanilla has, as I mentioned, a prejudice against the private-messaging
taking away from the forums, which is fair. But they've added whispering,
which is inlining private messages. This strikes me as *really* useful
for roleplaying, and solves a problem I've been having about what to do
about replying directly to a poster (because email addresses will now
appear as "member+KarenCravens@phoenyx.net"... so if someone *sent* mail
to that, did I want to risk using the Phoenyx as a "relay"?) Simple, I'll
just put it in the forum... as a whisper. That's almost worth
implementing right away.
The other big feature that will be somewhat down the road is scorefiling.
Want to read your own threads first, or ones in which you've replied?
Have a rule that assigns those a higher score. Really tired of people on
the Fudge list bringing up linked skills and attributes? Score down any
message with "link" or "linked" in it (well, okay, you might have to get
fancier). If something scores below your cutoff, it'll get ignored
altogether (pre-marked as read, most likely).
If it doesn't turn out to be outrageously processor-expensive, it'd be
really cool to have the system set to "send me email notifications only
for scores higher than X." No promises. (Yeah, we'll have email
notifications, even if we can't apply scorefiles for 'em. Why people
would want to have email notifications when they could just have the
*message* emailed to them and save having to click, I'll never know.)
--
Karen J. Cravens silver@phoenyx.net
