I'm sorry to flood the forum with messages asking for input but I am working on some pretty significant changes to the website and I'd like to take care of everything that needs to be taken care of all at once.

We've talked in the past about multiple forums and it has generally been agreed that it is probably not a good idea since there's so much overlap between where a message could go.

One thing I am considering--and would like feedback on--is the concept of "projects." Projects would be community projects (or private projects that are made public and there is a lot of potential discussion about) where files could be contributed to the project and there would be a discussion forum for each project. This would be for things like the "8052 computer" that grew to 170+ messages, perhaps Phillip Gallo's '51 video page (were he to be interested in making it a community effort), etc. In this case the "multiple forums" would be buried in the link to each project and each forum would only be to discuss that project.

I don't want to duplicate the functionality and purpose of sourceforge.net but it seems that it might be worthwhile to have this functionality for community development of certain 8052 projects. The question is whether or not it would be used and, if so, what kind of features should be included in project areas. Project administrator(s)? Forum? Related code section for that specific project? etc.?

A second issue I'm considering is the possibility of letting images be uploaded directly into posts. There's several ways this could be done. One is to attach them with a button on the message form--this probably will be included. But one other thing I was thinking of doing is that when an IMG tag is found in a message that that image would be grabbed by the website, hosted locally, and the IMG tag would be updated to point to the local copy. The advantage is that we could link to external images and they would never go away (because they would be copied locally). The disadvantage is that I'm not sure if there are copyright issues involved in caching publically available images--Google does it but I'm not sure that means everyone can. Google is special, you know. :)

Comments are, again, very much welcome.

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster