Legacy Services
This server still supports some ancient Web collaboration tools:
- The SPAM system for automatically maintaining
mailing lists
- The BooHoo system for automatically maintaining related links
- Loquacious, for adding collaboration to static Web sites
- LUSENET, database-backed threaded discussions
and Q&A forums
- clickthrough.net, a system for measuring
traffic clicking from Site A to Site B
- Uptime -- emails
you when your server is unreachable (died already but replaced by
friends at the openacs.org organization)
I'm currently trying to figure out how to redesign these services so that
- users are authenticated, e.g., before posting they have to
register and respond to an email message (we won't know who they are
but at least we'll know that they supplied an email address where they
can receive mail)
- a person is available to handle service inquiries
- a programmer is available to provide enhancements based on user
needs
- the site is financially self-sustaining, i.e., either the owners
of bboards or the most active posters are contributing to the costs of
sysadmin, programming, hosting/bandwidth, and customer service
When these services were built in the mid-1990s it made a lot of
sense. Running a database-backed Web server was an esoteric art that
required expensive hardware and proprietary software. But as we enter
the year 2002 there are quite a few 14-year-olds who've set up Linux,
Postgres, and OpenACS in less
than one day. With a $500 PC and a DSL line, they end up having all
the collaboration tools that dotcoms spent $10 million to construct.
Bottom line: prepare for some changes to these services!
