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So, my concept here that we like to operate in packrat threads, and then we like to branch those discussions and have sub discussions, and we can't really do any of that with our current system.

So I came up with the concept of just having posts, and those posts have tags. That's it, at the core. The power is that posts that share tags are arranged into "threads" so you can treat it like twitter and do like "FML, job sucks #vent" --and you just put that into the system arbitrarily. Then anyone who follows the firehose or the #vent "thread" will see it appear at the bottom of that "thread".

The power here is that you can have criss-crossing convos going, like "Fuck, I just lost my job, anyone hiring? #vent #workforce"--now it's in both "Threads" and people can reply in either one of them, or they can treat "#vent #workforce" as it's own special sub thread, and just view and respond to that.

I'll give you an example of the power here. A recurring issue is that people post a thread for new work and get no response. They get more love if they go to the "what are you working on" packrat, but then it's hard to have a solid convo about just that. Now you can do "Here's something I did #new-work #critique #pete #painting" and all those tags will automatically put the post into all those threads, and whatever combo you can think of -- like new work by pete, or critique posts of paintings, or new work that's a painting, or whatever.

There are a lot of desirable effects here that I don't have time to yak about right now, but this system lets users consume the content of the community in whatever way they want.

The main challenge is the UI. I think I basically banged it together to be workable, but it definitely needs help. It's been a while since I touched the codebase, but it'll need some love, I was just hacking on it when I left off, it's certainly not a marvel of engineering.

FIN.

Edit:

I wanted to add something that may not be clear. Even with all the shenanigans I wrote above above, the interface is designed to be almost identical to the current root, so it's really easy to keep using the same way you always have, except now it's much more powerful if you want it to be. For example, the "categories" side bar aren't set categories now, they act like a tag cloud (still arranged like a nav bar though), where the most popular "threads" (which are undoubtably the big categories like #vent) are arranged in order of popularity.