Since Dave/ Sciforum is having financial trouble in maintaining this board and Dave has to spend time adminstering it...here is an idea that could work if anyone out there is a hot programmer. What if, we develop a P2P program to replace Scifoum's central adminstration and website? The way it can be designed is for each member to store their replies and the topic metadata in their computers. The program will assemble the panels based on the master metadata at the Dave's computer at his home with a mirror at each moderators computer. Since the contents are at each individual computer, the load is distributed and Dave does not have to have a big server, website etc. People can volunteer to store the archives and contents of the ex-members again with redundancy and P2P can retrive the data close to the member. The idea needs some work...just think....
Neat idea, but it transcends sciforums in scope and would probably require a huge amount of work. But, when you think about it, this is really very similar to NNTP and Usenet. But still, an interesting idea given the current trendiness of P2P software and the burning desire among those in the P2P development community (myself included) to push these technologies beyond simple file sharing.
The sorry state of the telecommunications industry is a huge problem for P2P sharing like this. It just won't work for most people in Australia yet. Well, people can share stuff, but keeping it all synchronised enough to match a centralised forum would be hard. But... I was thinking, maybe all you need to share is file-update records. As in, if one machine finds a new link to what it doens't have, it downloads from that link... Really not so much work. It only needs to share text streams, and only a few now and then, easy enough for those with permanent connections. But this is new to me, so how much disc space would it require for users to keep copies of the forums on their own machines?
Cool idea. If (and thats a huge if) that becomes realtity, I'd lend out a certain amount of my HD space, no probs, just have to free it up
I'm not on 24/7 but I do get on whenever I can. I've just cleared 7gb of memory on my PC now, was starting to run outta space
Just the text (excluding the style and graphics overhead) should not be more than 500 MB if one shares all the postings. That would be for those who have cable, DSL or other broadband connection. Individual members may need to store only the threads that they start or reply. Rather than creating a file for each thread, it can be compressed to one object per main topic as in email boxes. One has to keep the object IDs stored such that P2P search is possible. If the mechanism works, a modified version can be sold to the corporate for collaboration working as in project work, research work etc. May be we need some venture funding to work on this and the product can be sold commercially for different applications.
I guess the nice bit of doing such a thing is that you could just get online and check an index file on your computer against all other index files currently online to see if anything has been added, and if so, it updates your own index file which will just show the thread names or whatever, and you can then decide whether to download that latest post or not. So apart from updating those index files, you only ever download the material you want to read. Just like now you only download the pages you wish to read and ignore the rest.
