Blogs and Mailing Lists and Wikis, again

Karen Cravens has some responses to my earlier entry on her Gamehawk development weblog.

(To which I say "Harrumph, I just said that (in different words, granted) on GAMERS, you plagiarist." Heh.)

That's pretty much my intention... the Gamehawk forums (and so far, "forum" is the most general-purpose word I can come up with) are already mailing lists, they'll be displayable in webboards (or blogs; the only real difference is display format), available via NNTP (technically they already are in the Firehawk version, if I turn it back on) and rss/Atom feeds. All that lacks in Gamehawk is, well, me testing it and getting it online. Which I should do instead of blogging.

Yes, on the surface the Group->Topic structure of the mailing list maps nicely onto the Weblog->Category structure of weblogs. But to muddy the waters a bit, for my Archive weblog I've used the Category for Chapters. I also notice a lot of bloggers have very large numbers of categories, and then archive all entries for each category on a single page. My use of categories on Where Worlds Collide is probably atypical, in that I've got a small list of very broad categories each covering what some people would put in completely different weblogs.

The only thing lacking is figuring out how to work the Wiki in easily. A Wiki's fine for hierarchical stuff, but a blog is sequential. I'm inclined to make forum entries (posts, blog entries/comments, whatever) a special case for the Wiki... it knows that a given post is groupname/topicname/message-sequence, and it could refer to stuff that way just as easily. I'm inclined to say you could assign a WikiWord to a particular post, in addition. That way you can "name" chapters of the game, or whatever.

Wikis are a different hovercraft of eels. I actually think a Category field would be a good addition to the functionality of the Wiki; it would allow you specify whether a WikiWord was a piece of cultural background, a location, or a PC or NPC character sheet. Could you simply use the subject line (WithAllTheSpacesRemoved) as the WikiWord? What about duplicates? Should they be treated as followups? Or rejected?

On the other hand, you couldn't edit them... could you? I suppose you could. You could opt to re-send the email (or not, for proofreading edits). The NNTP side would pose a slight problem, since the message-sequence wouldn't (shouldn't, mustn't) change

I'd recommend the way the Dreamlyrics nntp server handles these; when the user updates an existing web post, the nntp interface treats it as a new post referencing the original, then deletes the original.

So users who had read the original post, then pick up the updated one see this:

Thread Start
+-Original Post
  +-Updated Post

While a user who didn't perform an nntp post between the original posting and the update would see:

Thread Start
+-Updated Post