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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at panix dot com
Date: 2005-10-04 16:55:58
Subject: Re: New message board? (was: Re: Old Saxon)
> Well for one, topics and subtopics would be nice. For example:
>
> Old English
> Bosworth and Toller
> A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary
> General
> Old Icelandic
> An Icelandic-English Dictionary
> Old Icelandic paradigms
> General
> Proto-Germanic
> Gothic
> General
So if I'm understanding, this would be a column like the date or author, and you can sort the articles by topic, or look at only one topic?
I guess the user could classify his/her own topic from a pop-up menu. The moderator could have the ability to revise it if the user-selected topic wasn't the most appropriate one. Or something like that.
> A search feature would be very nice. You just have to look at some
> other message boards that are out there. There are some really great
> open source ones as well.
I considered using an existing message board system. The reason I ended up writing my own message board system was that I wanted everyone to be able to make margin comments in the dictionaries. It seemed to make sense to have these comments appear on the message board (not just in the dictionary search system) so that other people see them as they get posted and can respond. This ability had to be specially built into the message board system.
The search system is a good idea. I'd have to think about the best way to write it. I'm not sure which would be more confusing: to have a totally separate search system from the dictionary search ("Why am I getting totally different search results now?"), or to have one big search over both (and maybe over the static web pages on the site as well). I think I'd probably make one big system, since folks are used to having the whole world available to them thru the single search form in Google, for example.
Comments and thoughts wanted.
--Sean