I love the idea of realtime anonymous forums by accident some months ago. I was writing an updated library for Friendfeed's API and decided to write a client for testing, but while rushing through I had left out identifying information from the client.
It was one of the most interesting experiences I've had online; I noticed that I was liking/not-liking things specific people would say, that I normally wouldn't. I had somehow managed to surpass the internal biases I had built up about specific people. Obviously doesn't answer the question of how I'd change if I was acting anonymously, since everyone else could identify me. But for me looking out and interacting largely anonymously with people I already knew was profound.
Personally, I find the color's annoying and cluttered, but it is a decent idea to add some common identity inside a thread. I like the idea in general, and would love to see more things like it.
You're writing was great. I laughed several times during the "Then all hell broke loose" section.
Thanks! I spent a couple of days on the article and was pretty nervous having not written anything but specs in a year or two.
I also am starting to find the colors cluttering, mostly because they're the first thing my eyes are drawn to on any given page. I'm not sure what the solution is here. If I make them any smaller, they look even worse.
I think you only need the colors inside a thread and not really on the front page... and then in one thread you could just add a unique picture/avatar per participant (but maybe something subtle, not like a usual avatar - I was thinking of replacing the color rectangle by a random picture of the same format)
I don't know if you were influenced by it, but anonymous text boards are somewhat common on the Japanese internet, and there are a small number of English (and Spanish and German) language derivatives. Unfortunately, even though there are several pieces of text board software, they're all very similar. Seeing something like this which is highly divergent is quite a treat.
Are threads ordered by most recent post or something more complicated?
If you hash the ip and then use that for colouring the hash function is likely to be surjective (rather than bijective) but perhaps you could still work back to "it was probably one of these x (255?) ips"? If you then open source the code too, do you make it more susceptible to working back to the original ip? Perhaps you'd need some form of salt too?
I'm using MD5 for the hash, so I believe that makes it surjective? I could be very wrong though. Salting by the post ID is a very good idea. I might implement that tonight!
It doesn't have to be enforced algorIthmically. It can just use a client-side spellchecking library that makes spelling errors very visible. When it detects > $THRESHOLD errors, then it shows a warning saying, "Your post will be partially hidden if you don't fix your spelling/grammar errors." Then, on the client-side, it changes the opacity to something like 0.5 for posts with > $THRESHOLD spelling/grammar errors.
Also you need to watch out for Unicode control characters messing everything up! Certain characters (up to you to figure out which) should actually be stripped as they have no useful function for Western languages...
Please, please do not use ragefaces while writing.
In addition to being an utterly exhausted internet meme, they take something out of the prose- it would be more compelling, better flowing writing if you were to try and describe your own feelings.
I should add that, as prosody said, imageboard discussions are working anonymous communication models.
Take 2channel, with the slogan 「ハッキング」から「今晩のおかず」まで (From "hacking" to "side dishes for tonight's dinner"): it generates revenue of around 100 million yen per year; or perhaps 4chan, which has either scarred the internet, or broadened it depending on your viewpoint, having once (I believe) produced those images you used in your post.
I'd be really interested to see how you use similar projects to inspire yours, and as I've tried to show, innovation in this area could be influential or lucrative.
Ragefaces are one of my favorite parts of Internet culture, and I did think about it before I inserted them into the post. I think they give it a certain feeling, that this is an experiment and I'm playing around.
I've tried to take the good parts of every service I could find, and leave out the rest. I don't intend to make any revenue from this site. It's only for fun :)
instead of the color (which personally I like), you could use numbers, so the first person who replies is #1, next is #2, and they re-use that number for the extent of that thread. That way if you're having a discussion with someone, you know it's still them
That's an interesting question, and I don't think I have the answer... And if I did I wouldn't tell you and launch my own website ;)
Seriously though, I think it would be hard to get a sense of community on a website where you can't identify the persons that are interacting with you... But of course the whole point is to be anonymous.
It was one of the most interesting experiences I've had online; I noticed that I was liking/not-liking things specific people would say, that I normally wouldn't. I had somehow managed to surpass the internal biases I had built up about specific people. Obviously doesn't answer the question of how I'd change if I was acting anonymously, since everyone else could identify me. But for me looking out and interacting largely anonymously with people I already knew was profound.
Personally, I find the color's annoying and cluttered, but it is a decent idea to add some common identity inside a thread. I like the idea in general, and would love to see more things like it.
You're writing was great. I laughed several times during the "Then all hell broke loose" section.