Federation Commander

[Kang]

In response to the blog posting:

http://federationcommander.blogspot.com/2010/08/we-want-your-comments.html

The new front page is very clean and easy to follow. It's logically laid out and clear.

One minor glitch: you still spell 'Discuss' as if it's a round frisbee thing that they throw in athletics tournaments (the button "Discus-BBS")
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[Jean]

Ummmmmmm...

That would be because that is what it is: Discus 3.10.5 PRO.


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Business Manager/RPG Line Editor
Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.

[Dan Ibekwe]

All in all well done, although in the miniatures painting guides the Hydrans seem to have captured a marauding Neo-Tholian ship.

(Web Casters together with Stingers, hmm...)
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We are Hydrans! NO ONE LIKES US!

[Kang]

[Jean]

Yep. That's why if you hear one of the Steves or me talking about that board, we will accent the first syllable.

We've never found another software program that allows us to have the tools we need for development purposes and which allows so few people to moderate such a large and active board. We need to see the first few words of posts so that we can scan down a list of what has been posted in the last 24 hours and spot a topic that we need to visit in order to answer a question or calm rising tensions.
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Business Manager/RPG Line Editor
Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.

[Kang]

In which case, I retract my original comment. Discus it is!

Still, you gotta admit that the context does make sense if it says 'Discuss'. Perhaps that's why they called the software that.
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[Steve Cole]

Yeah, some people curse discus because it's so old, but it's so vastly more powerful than PHP. If we had to run the main board on PHP, we'd close the company. It would just be impossible to process that many posts on that many topics. (This board is moving toward being difficult but the other one gets four times the traffic.)

The trick is that on PHP we get a list of the topics which have some new posts, but no idea how many posts or what they're about. With Discus, we get the first five or six words of every new post. So we can spot a topic tht suddenly has 16 new posts in it, and we can spot a topic with posts that begin with things like "You're a total moron" and so we can spot flamewars before they get worse.

Remember that the people running this or any BBS only read 10-20% of it. Most topics are clearly not of any real concern to the company officers. They're not new product developments and they're mostly private discussions of interest to a few players. (Half of the posts on the other board are about campaigns or ongoing games which the company hosts but doesnt have to monitor.) If one of those suddenly starts including "you moron!" posts then we know we need to pay attention. If somebody posts a new idea (like somebody did last night) and it explodes into dozens of posts debating that idea, we know we need to drop in a see if it's a workable idea or one that is illegal to start with and needs to be closed down.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander