Webmention-based Message Board

created Jun 25, 2017

crazy idea. a message board that only accepted webmentions as thread starter posts and for the comments to the threads. technically, the thread starter post would be an article, since it would have a title, and comments would be notes. that's how it appears at toledotalk.com

but webmention posts that would be thread comments can have titles because it depends upon the software the person is using to create the comment. it's possible that the blog or cms app requires that every post contain a title.

man, using a blog site to post comments to another website would create a lot of noise on that blogger's homepage. that's why indieweb users separate their posts by types, although many put their notes on the their homepages.

a new thread starter post would be a wemention reply that would call the target the index.html or homepage of the site.

a comment would be a webmention reply that would target the thread starter post page.

since most publishing apps do not support sending a webmention, the message board host site would provide the text input field for people to place urls.

the message board site could store the info in a database, like couchdb or mysql. it wouldn't take much. maybe i would borrow from scaup. i would need to provide search via elastic search.

if posters used microformats, that would help with displaying the content at the host message boar site, but that won't happen.

many users could be posting from, well, everywhere that was publicly viewable.

maybe the host message board site focuses on displaying only plain text by stripping out all of the html. but that would remove links. and this would apply for posting the entire webmention.

better might be to borrow form jothut. remove the html. display the first x-hundred chars. and provide a link back to the original post. if the webmention is longer than x-hundred chars, then "read more" text would also be provided, along with the link to the other person's website.

that would be better because for long posts, it would encourage users to visit the poster's website to read the entire post.

spammers and trashware distributors, however, could start the first couple paras with topic-related text, encouraging others to read more, and then when readers arrive at the nefarious website, the readers could be hit with garbage.

but that happens now. people can do that at facebook and twitter.

might need a moderation webmention microformat server where users can remotely flag a post or someone's website. then the message board site could block all future posts from that domain.

pretending the boghop webmentions page is a thread, discussing toledo politics. instead of webmentions.html, the thread post might be fix-the-blanking-roads.html.

http://boghop.com/webmentions.html

and this post here at wren.soupmode.com would be a comment to that toledo politics thread about not having money to repair our streets.