Several months ago I gave up on my project, Alibi imageboards, which was an imageboard application I never managed to finish. Still wanting to revisit the idea of having my own boards, I came up with the idea of EleoChan. Although the ideas that make up EleoChan aren't original in themselves, how they've been applied to the very old concept of imageboards is.
In an age where most imageboards are very much alike, I'm actually interested in hearing what everyone's opinion of my idea and implementation is. I've gotten both negative and positive feedback, some people liking the unusualness and other people are outright confused and feel alienated by the dissimilarity to sites like 4chan. Not everyone seems to recognize the overall idea: completely user-driven boards.
A lot of features I wanted are not there yet, but the general skeleton for what will come is. So, post, play around with it, etc, and tell me what you think. Also keep in mind, separate tags with commas, not spaces.
First off, clicking the link in your name (http://imgboard.eleochan.org/) brings up a page with an error message. Fortunately I just had to press enter and the site appeared as it should.
From experience with Anonib many user created boards are so slow that they can sit there for months without any new posts. You need to have some way of telling visitors which boards have had new posts. Otherwise there will be a lot of unnecessary clicking, especially since you arrange the boards alphabetically. It's not much of a problem right now, but imagine a hundred+ boards in the future. Increasing the font size for post count simply doesn't work well.
If you want to make the boards user driven you should think about alternative ways of arranging the boards. One link can sort boards alphabetically, another by latest post (I recommend as default) and another by total post count or whatever way people might want to view the board list. Allowing them to view by post count also works as a carrot to post more in their favorite boards. Yah, so it's a bit e-penisy and smells of avatar based forums but any new anonymous board will need some tricks to boost traffic.
Actually you're probably right. I realized just now that it was difficult to tell which boards had been posted to.
On the other hand, I'm wondering if it's that much of an issue? Imageboards with static boards don't really show you if there are new posts... You kind of just check for yourself.
Another thing I'm trying to avoid is emphasizing the popular boards too much. The idea was similar to AnonIB's; that anyone could create niche board if they wanted, but instead of the boards being owned by one person, they're owned by no one and presented to all, so it would be hopefully less egocentric. So I don't want users to come and have all of their attentions drawn to the /b/ board. Surely, the tag cloud contributes to this, but on the other hand they're still presented with an alphabetical tag cloud so they can read through and see what else might appeal to them...
Planning this out definitely has a sociological element to it. I'm trying to find the right balance.
Also the error message is probably related to my host, DreamHost. From time to time I get 500 errors, and reloading the page fixes it. This is something not present when I am developing the application on my local server. It could be some internal bug in my app, but I can't tell for sure. If/when the board grows I will have to get a real host, at least a VPS, but since I'm not at that point yet, I decided to go with the lovely startup cost of $22.40 for a years worth of "hosting". And, thats only if I don't pull out before 97 days.
Anyway, thanks for your feedback.
You could let the font size indicate activity in the last week, instead of total post count. That shouldn't be too egocentric and tells people which boards have new content. You won't get rid of unnecessary clicking but it will save some bandwidth and CPU cycles. Which will probably be offset by board creators feeling compelled to keep "their" boards active. At least it won't be a contest over whose board has the most posts. Also, just because other image boards haven't thought of something, doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea.
>You could let the font size indicate activity in the last week, instead of total post count.
>At least it won't be a contest over whose board has the most posts.
Well, won't it? The only difference is that it wouldn't be such a persistent overshadowing of one board over the others, unless I am mis-imagining the concept.
I'm still wondering if I should call then "tags" or "boards". Tagging is generally used more so as extra(neous) meta-data used to facilitate the finding of material that can already be found through other means. In my case, without tags there's no way to find content. Calling them "boards" instead of "tags" might cause users to choose their categorizations more wisely. I think when people think of tagging they think of any random words associated with their content; anything for people to find it. I more so want users to carefully choose, and think to themselves, "if I could post this on three boards, what boards would those be?" It would also be less confusing to new users. I have had a lot of people get to the tag cloud and go "okay, now what?" Perhaps if it said "Boardlist" instead, people would realize that the tags are the boards.
On the other hand I feel like I'm lying to myself calling them boards, especially when I have a database table called "tags" and another called "taggings".
Yeah...
You know, if you really want to be Web 2.0-compliant, you could let people alter tags after the post is made.
>>9
Yeah, I plan to get around to that at some point. Although, it would probably be within limits, as something like that could be abused (ie user makes several, I dunno, gay porn threads, and then suddenly has them added to the straight porn board or some unrelated board to offend users out of nowhere). So, something like that might have to be coupled with a reporting feature or some other form of moderation. I also intend to allow users to edit posts within a certain time frame after they make them, most likely with some very obvious "this post has been edited" notice as result.
I just spend like two days doing a small code rewrite which could have been used to add other features :-/, like search. There's still bugs all over the damn place.
>Web 2.0-compliant
aaaaaaaaaaaaugh. My intention is merely to be user-friendly. I really reject the whole zomg web 2.0 for trend thing :( I'll probably be unable to avoid that label longterm.
You know, I am kind of bummed. I developed an imageboard that is quite different from other imageboards and expected a reaction, positive or negative, from the Society, and really didn't get one at all. Where are all the people who think my way of going about things is inventive and user-friendly? Where are all the people who think I utterly failed? Damn.
I think you are ahead of your time.
Re-release it in a year or two.
>>12
Perhaps. Or I can try to stick with it and attract more users, even though I can't seem to jump past more than a couple hundred a day. Lately I've thought about taking EleoChan down, or even giving the source code to a friend of mine or developing a branch for his site specifically.
I guess no matter how cool your site is, it doesn't matter unless people use it :(
>>11
You have utterly failed. Because imageboards are not about pictures or text or forms. They are about people communication. Your software is not about communication, it is about exchanging sets of images, and galleries are probably far more suited for that purpose.
How is EleoChan anymore about exchanging sets of images, and less about discussion, than any other imageboard? Please let me know, so I can try to improve upon it. But...
>Because imageboards are not about pictures or text or forms. They are about people communication.
These two statements seem somewhat contradictory. Of course the point is discussion, but on an imageboard, discussion revolves around pictures or text, which is generally submitted using forms.
>>15
For some reason that hasn't really been the case on English language ones at least. They are just sort of used as cheap systems to get an anonymous discussion board up, with ability to add pictures for added humor or to add on to comments. Sometimes though it is about the pictures.
It really seems to vary. For example 4chan's /hr/ seems to be way more focused around image dumping. There's discussions, but people usually go there for interesting material to download to their hard drive. A lot of text posts consist of thank yous, insults, or requests. I know I usually just browse it to find cool pictures to download. Discussion is sort of happenstance.
Then you have /b/ where there's really no consistency. The uploaded image could be the topic of discussion, it could be related to the topic being discussed, or it could be completely unrelated and just there to pass validation for what might otherwise be a text post. A lot of discussions belong on text boards, but I users are so drawn to imageboards instead... I guess images are more stimulating.
I'm rambling.
Oh but anyway, I don't see how EleoChan in particular is guilty of just being an image dump instead of image discussion board. Right now there's way more images than text, but that seems to be due to lack of activity, not board functionality, as far as I know.
I know where I live too.
I know what you did last summer
who bumped this shit.
someone who knows what you did last summer, apparently.
I didn't. I would though, maybe.
Summer of 2008 or Summer of 2007?
I feel kind of out-of-place here for not having a tripcode and a name ending in "o".
LOL
That was well-timed, Anonymous.
You made me laugh, I'mma maek you some pancaeks sometime for that.
What I have been wanting for a long time is an imageboard that adds Tag data to the metadata of the pictures hosted. so if i download a bunch of pictures, my windows 7, picasa, etc will know which if my pictures is part of what category automatically.
>>29
I bet that could be done with danbooru + some clever firefox extension.
>>31
bumping old threads isn't really that offensive of a thing to do.
sometimes it brings an interesting old topic to the attention of new users whom would have otherwise never viewed it.
>>32
bumping old threads when you have nothing at all to add is, on the other hand, a very offensive thing to do.
>>33
I disagree, I would not have viewed this thread had it not been brought to my attention otherwise.
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