This is a problem that I've been mulling over for years, I don't have any really good answers but here's something half-baked that I'm going to throw out for discussion.
One of the systemic problems with Tribe.net is the way that announcements are made to a community. The listings subsystem completely sucks for reaching communities, and listings posted in tribes are pretty much routinely ignored or not seen at all. However, there are often half a dozen (or more, sometimes) closely-related tribes that one might want to post an announcement to.
The behavior I'm seeing now is that people post the exact same announcement to multiple tribes. This works well for getting the widest reach, but sucks for the reader. I know that what often happens with me is that I see half a dozen tribes that have three new messages in them, and when I go to each tribe it's the same three announcements. Because tribes are independent, you have to go into each tribe one at a time to clear the new message indicators for the tribes.
The need I see is for a special type of message: one that can be posted to multiple tribes in one fell swoop, but that is considered read in all tribes once it's been viewed. (This is much like a Usenet cross-posting, wherein one can post one message to multiple newsgroups.) Announcements would behave exactly like discussion posts, except that once the announcement was viewed in one tribe it would be treated as read in all of the user's tribes.
I would propose that these messages can be replied to, but that replies are specific to the tribe in which the message was replied to. In other words, if I post an announcement to tribe X, Y and Z and someone replies from Z, the reply only winds up in Z.
One potential problem with a system like this is abuse/spamming. This could be mitigated to some extent by limiting the number of tribes that an announcement could be posted to (maybe a maximum of 3-5) and then further rate-limiting the posting process (maybe one per person per day.)
Ideally, I would recommend adding ban-user-from-a-tribe functionality at the same time, so that moderators had the power to permanently boot anyone who abused this system.
One of the systemic problems with Tribe.net is the way that announcements are made to a community. The listings subsystem completely sucks for reaching communities, and listings posted in tribes are pretty much routinely ignored or not seen at all. However, there are often half a dozen (or more, sometimes) closely-related tribes that one might want to post an announcement to.
The behavior I'm seeing now is that people post the exact same announcement to multiple tribes. This works well for getting the widest reach, but sucks for the reader. I know that what often happens with me is that I see half a dozen tribes that have three new messages in them, and when I go to each tribe it's the same three announcements. Because tribes are independent, you have to go into each tribe one at a time to clear the new message indicators for the tribes.
The need I see is for a special type of message: one that can be posted to multiple tribes in one fell swoop, but that is considered read in all tribes once it's been viewed. (This is much like a Usenet cross-posting, wherein one can post one message to multiple newsgroups.) Announcements would behave exactly like discussion posts, except that once the announcement was viewed in one tribe it would be treated as read in all of the user's tribes.
I would propose that these messages can be replied to, but that replies are specific to the tribe in which the message was replied to. In other words, if I post an announcement to tribe X, Y and Z and someone replies from Z, the reply only winds up in Z.
One potential problem with a system like this is abuse/spamming. This could be mitigated to some extent by limiting the number of tribes that an announcement could be posted to (maybe a maximum of 3-5) and then further rate-limiting the posting process (maybe one per person per day.)
Ideally, I would recommend adding ban-user-from-a-tribe functionality at the same time, so that moderators had the power to permanently boot anyone who abused this system.
posted by:
|
-
Re: New message type: announcement
Tue, May 13, 2008 - 11:44 AMI think that this is a really good idea exactly as you've proposed it, Patti!
-
Re: New message type: announcement
Tue, May 13, 2008 - 12:27 PMThis is actually a good idea. I'll see where it fits into the spec for the new system I wrote. Listings and events will be a big part of the rewrite, mostly because I have been looking at Facebook and noticing how AWESOME their events and listings are.
Please note, everybody: I'm not going to make tribe.net look like Facebook, but I am stealing as much as I can from things that Facebook does well if I can.
I have already been thinking about limitations on posting and how to work with those. My current inclination is to keep the current limitations but lift them for folks with a Gold Star.
-
-
Re: New message type: announcement
Tue, May 13, 2008 - 1:29 PMI would think carefully about creating what would in essence be a pay-to-spam system. I certainly understand the pull of giving premium members extra privileges, but doing so at the cost of making the system more annoying to use probably isn't a good idea.
-
