Quine rantings and ravings...

[angelwolfgeek]

Updating to a newer version of the software added a few useful basic features (such as the ability to add static pages), and i've taken the chance to draft a basic set of rules, and an 'about' page. While the ball is in the dev team's court, in my opinion, one of the things that made running WL a pain (well when i was solo) was that there was no real framework to run things in - i intend to try to get an organised beta up before unveiling the site to users, as opposed to the "the. what? that many?" way that the incarnation of WL i ran debuted.

Of course, there's the whole 'no one's really managed to get a new community website to be a hit (WL dosen't count - it has critical mass) in quite a while - and formerly active sites dying. So here we are. I have an idea someone else found good enough that he offered to help, the basics of what we need, and a very clear/focused idea of what we want to do, and what else we need. I'm also feeling the community in many ways has lost a bit of its footing, and i'm not exactly a fan of how some of the current sites are run - more on that later on

On the other hand, we're a new 'idea'. We arn't trying to unseat an incumbent site or two (and god, its amazing how much drama loyalists of the former favourite site or servers can kick up).  And while we arn't quite suggesting a life of brian style splitting of the community, well, lets face it, there arn't that many people who run things, and especially in the sense of large community sites.

One thing i believe is that for Quine to survive we *need* to hit critical mass as early on post release as possible. Werelist had the 'brand name'- we need to start building interest a little before release, and use our beta testers effectively. Effectively i suspect that the first 3 months will decide if quine will survive or not.

The idea of Q&A sites are semi common - we'd rather be something like the stack overflow than say yahoo answers - which require a core of 'superusers' - folk who have a good solid grasp on reality, and are able to answer intelligently, and have them right from the start. Beta testers should be mostly of this sort.

The second thing is features - we arn't afraid to prune back - quine was originally planned as seperate therian and otherkin sites, but when we launch we'll have a combined site and rely on the catagory/tagging system  to seperate them. On the other hand there's a few security/design issues that need fixing, and some user permissions that would probably be a big help. As a non dev team member, i'm trying not to have featuritis - the main question i ask before requesting any additions is "do we REALLY need this?".