Stardate 20020712.2206

(Captain's log): When I first started this site in March 2001, one of the things I missed was any feedback. So when I got my own server, one of the things I wanted to do was to install a system whereby people could make comments about my posts, and interact with me about them. The number of choices was at the time rather limited, and I had certain requirements (in particular, I required the ability to exclude troublemakers) so I ended up purchasing the software for UBBS and installing it on this server.

It's a standard discussion system package, and it has worked very well on a technical level. For a long time, I would eagerly visit it several times per day, just to see what kinds of things people had posted and respond to them. But as time went on I began to lose interest. Instead of short threads which might be directly related to a FPP, it started getting progressively more and more topic drift, with the discussions having less and less to do with my web site and what I posted to it and turning into general bull-sessions, which is what I always wanted to avoid. And as the number of participants rose, the amount of discord and bad behavior I had to clean up after, and the amount of management grunch work I had to do, also rose: locking threads which had spiraled out of control, deleting egregious posts, dealing with registration problems, even making the decision to ban users now and again and then put up with angry or pleading emails from them.

What I've found is that for the last couple of months, Clueless Comments hasn't been a place that I myself felt like visiting. If it had been installed on someone else's server, I probably would have just stopped going to it entirely. But since it was mine and I had assumed the responsibility of keeping it working, I forced myself to visit it once a day. But instead of looking forward to that, I found it had become a chore, something I did out of obligation and wished I didn't have to. In fact, I don't remember the last time I actually felt like visiting it, or was glad I had afterwards.

That's been creeping up on me for a long time, and so it took me a while to really notice it. Sometimes I make decisions consciously, by considering issues and evaluating the alternatives. But sometimes I make them on a lower level, not really in the logical-verbal part of my brain. One day I'll suddenly realize that I've made a decision about something that I didn't necessarily even know I was considering. That happened Wednesday; I realized I didn't want the forum to continue. I'm going to shut it down.

Using UBBS on this system for feedback on my site was an interesting experiment, but I now consider it a failure, and I've decided to end it. While it probably is something other people still like, I don't like it anymore. So down it goes. It will remain online so that old threads can be accessed, but I will disable the ability to create new posts and new threads, and will disable new membership registrations.

I'd just like to make clear that no single behavior or particular user is responsible for this, nor is this a reaction to anything recent as such. The vast majority of the people who have participated in the forum have been good citizens and have tried to play by the rules I've set and the last two weeks of activity haven't been noticeably worse than the month before that. It's just an accumulation of things, an overall feeling of weariness. There's a party happening in my home, but I'm spending most of my time out on the porch trying to get away from the noise, and only going inside once in a while to be polite. That isn't how it ought to be.

I'm not sure what, if anything, I might replace it with. The kind of feedback I originally hoped for I'm actually getting now, but I'm getting it from direct email that people send me, and from people who comment about my posts on their own blogs.

This whole process has been one of experimentation and evolution. I began USS Clueless on my web site on RR's server with FrontPage, then decided to migrate it to my own server using Greymatter, then later decided that Greymatter (for all its virtues) wasn't scaling well as the cumulative backlog of posts got huge, so I switched again to CityDesk. Greymatter had a search engine built into it but it wasn't sophisticated and it was really slow; I ended up finding another which worked much better and was much faster and more sophisticated. I've also redesigned the site graphics a couple of times.

It's a process of experimentation and refinement. Some things work, some don't. What works you keep; what doesn't you get rid of. All good engineering is like that, but usually the process isn't as visible as it has been here. The key is the willingness to recognize failures when you see them (or are responsible for them) because you can't fix what you don't admit is broken.

UBBS is one of the things that didn't end up working, for me, and I can't see any way to modify it to make it so that I do like it. But without trying it out, there was no way to know that. So I'd like to thank everyone who has participated in it over the last year, and apologize to those who are using it now and will feel cut off. You all end up paying the price of my mistake, and that is unfortunate but unavoidable.

Update: After tossing and turning in bed for three hours, I think I can (and should) formulate a bit better just how it is that the forum has not met my expectations.

I originally intended it as a way for people to give me p