I look around at a lot of different imageboards and recently I was thinking about how they're all so similarly organized and how one might create variations of the organization methods. Back in the old days I used to look at 4chan and I didn't venture too much from /n/ and /ck/, so, just for an example, I was thinking that it would have been a convenience for me to be able to go to a URL like
zip.4chan.org/ck/n/
and have the threads of both boards open in one tab, mixed together in the conventional manner, with the threads organized by the time of the most recent post, maybe with a different background color for the threads from the different boards. as we all know switching between tabs is such a huge pain, so implementing something like this would be a huge improvement and if I wanted to see what was going on in /p/ then I would just append /p/ to the URL making it
zip.4chan.org/ck/n/p/
this is getting to be a long post, so i'll just stop here, but i have some other ideas i might type up later too, please feel free to contribute your own.
Hmm. I think the opposite would be more useful.
Think Danbooru style, where you can give a thread "tags" instead of posting on a specific board. Maybe a new thread would be posted "onto" a specific board, /ck/ for example, and as people replied they could add new board-tags to the thread, say one new board tag per post. And maybe one of the functions of a moderator/janitor would be to remove irrelevant tags from threads much like deleting the thread except it still exists on the board that it's actually related to.
If you did it that way you could look at multiple boards the way you're suggesting - just request the union of all the board-tags. But! You could also look up the intersection of tags to define precisely what you're actually interested in seeing. So if all you want is threads related to news about car-related television shows, you could go to 4chan.org/new/o/tv/. (And just think about what fun you might have if you wanted to see threads about flash animations of lesbians who cook!)
>>2
There is a pretty good thread about lesbians who cook buried in the back pages of
srbijachan.org/perv/
I made myself a custom frameset for all of the imageboards that i use, which are a good number of slow as molasses boards from a couple dozen different internets. i think that if there were something like shii's site, but you could do something like click a box next to the boards on the list to create your own virtual imageboard site (by making a custom frameset), some people might find that useful.
Thats more of organizing the internet or really just an alternative to bookmarks than it is what OP is talking about, but still, its a unused method that might be implemented for the greater good. could also be a good way of tracking what the [s]best[/s]most popular imageboards are.
A long time ago, I heard about those dedicated 2ch readers. IIRC, they work like newsreaders (USENET) did, scanning boards for posts, and only downloading the new ones.
If something like this existed for english-language board software, I believe it would be much easier to keep up with all of the tiny niche image and text BBSes out there. Instead of having to check a dozen tiny boards for new posts, they would simply appear at the top of your "new post list" any time one was made. Or, if you only wanted to follow one thread, you could do that as well. Since the server would do nothing but send you the posts, you could easily perform all kinds of searches and content filters and whatnot on the posts as well.
When updating, the program would send the server the number of the last post downloaded. The server would then check if any newer posts exist (whether that be in one thread, or in a whole board). If they do, it would send them to the reader in plain text (not a whole formatted HTML page, just the post data), perhaps using some standardized format like JSON or whatever. Lastly, the reader would replace update the record of the last post downloaded, and the update would be done.
This is very much like what you are describing, but since it is operated on the client-side instead of the server-side, it would be a lot more usable for the, well, users, and a lot less of a burden towards site operators. In fact, in the same manner that is does with newsreaders, it would actually require a lot less bandwidth per user in the long run, given all of the duplicated data sent when a thread updates.
I'm aware that we have RSS feeds, but those aren't quite good enough. MrVacBob added a JSON interface to Shiichan, but no one (the last time I checked, which was over half a year ago) ever did anything with it, other than progscrape, and I'm pretty sure that was a CLI program, not something comfortable to use on a regular basis, and not all that close to what I was thinking of.
While (correct) tagging is much more useful for finding the content a user wants, I still think topic-focused boards are useful for providing users with a "home." The communities on dedicated boards evolve in ways that might be lost if users were forcibly mixed into one board that separated content with tags alone. Mentally, users feel like they can "belong" to a board and its community (even if anonymous). That said, tagging could be added to boards and a cross-board tag search would help users find their shitting dicknipples faster.
>>3
I did something similar myself. I made a sidebar in Firefox that resembled iichan's board list but with some different stuff on it. Pretty much it functioned as my bookmark list, but with a nice 'chan-ish looking interface. The nice thing about having it as a sidebar is it doesn't interfere with the history / address bar / browser tabs that way.
>>4
There is actually a Shiichan reader floating around... somewhere.
>>5
Go away, hotaru.
There actually was a tagged based board at one point. It's dead though and its code wasn't release to the public.
Thread about it: http://wakaba.c3.cx/soc/kareha.pl/1178788477/l50
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