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I am intrigued to actually find a topic like this as the thoughts behind the question it asks are just as mundane yet as troubled as the ones that i’ve had since the moment i read about BP a few days ago. Not at all to insult the creators of this obviously much-adored piece of software. I’m almost ashamed to admit that i wholly agree with TireKicker’s pondering. Ashamed because it makes me feel old.
I pretty much grew up in forums and find their logical structure so natural they are almost like a safe haven to me.Anyways, i too feel very confused with whether i should go for BP, a forum or both for a new clan site of mine. As i’ve played around with BP for a few days now i can honestly say that there hardly is anything to dislike with it, even though its lack of structure still bothers the very core of me. It’s like handing a clay-worker a glass of water to work with. It’s so fluid that you don’t really know what it is or what you can do with it. It feels so alien that i still, even several days of working with it, can’t figure out whether it’s better than a forum or whether a clan would even want it or not. It would be very interesting to get a developer’s input on BP’s core ideology and actual, formal use of it. Examples of websites using it and for what. The “You can use it for whatever you’d like!” answer doesn’t really answer anything. Not that i’m complaining! I’m just so stumped that i can’t figure this software out. Mind you facebook scared me away pretty quickly too, so don’t take it personally! An information-flow like FB is a nightmare to people who enjoy order.
And this is why i’m asking you for help in explaining its formal use, so i can figure out whether my members would actually enjoy it or hate it. It might just be the most brilliant plugin ever, which would bode well for me if i as a manager who enjoys progress as much as anyone got my members started with it. Does it have any use for a clan, you think? I mean, it has an activity-page with everything happening in it, on which you can reply to everything and make even more happen, plus groups with their own activity-page on which you can make even more happen. Then there’s your own user-page that displays everything i made happen, where anyone can make even more happen, that gets added to THEIR user-page and again back to the main activity-page.
An endless cycle of information about everything from everyone, everywhere on the site. I don’t know if i’m a digital dinosaur at age 25 or if i’m simply having a bad week, but what exactly is so attractive about this flow of information? Who really wants to know everything that everyone does on a website? EVERYTHING? If i visit the site one day and feel like talking about, say, dinosaurs, how can i do that when i’ll be bombarded with a hundred other pieces of information regarding either the start, end or the middle-grounds of other subjects that i didn’t intend to read during that visit? And if i decide NOT to read all of that info every time i visit that site, how do i know what i missed? What if i missed something important because i didn’t realize its importance since it was just mumbled up among all the other information? How do you produce anything meaningful when there is no structure whatsoever to hint me or anyone else at what is important and what isn’t? How can one keep up with random comments regarding random subjects every time they visit the site? What if i forget what one subject was about? Will i have to go back and look for every comment made about that particular subject and read through half of it again just because i missed two or three comments?
How can you actually keep a discussion about a specific subject in a software like BP? What’s BP’s version of topics? How do you keep things ordered? How do you make a sticky? Are you supposed to create a new group every time that you want to have a specific discussion? One group per subject, that every member has to join in order to take part in? A group discussing dinosaurs, the weather, cooking lessons, the next map pack for Battlefield 3? Won’t that consume a heck lot of server resources?
Hmmm, you do come up with some ideas when you write what you think like this. How about adding color to messages in BP? Red for important, gray being just notices, blue being personal, green being something else. That could potentially solve the lack of knowledge of importance issue. That would at least bring some clarity to WHAT i’m actually reading and WHY.
BP along with a forum seems, just like Neonocon pointed out, quite like an overkill. The thing is, neither he nor i seemingly understand whether or not it is since we don’t understand the actual point with BP. It’s a forum plus something alien. Is that a good combination or not? Have you developers thought about this too? If you have, would you say that BP would be the main attraction and the forum the backup, or the other way around? BP is obviously a very different way than a forum to handle information, but it is a BETTER way? Does it actually help anyone, for anything? I mean, it’s pretty easy to keep up-to-date with every new post in a forum, thanks to neat little “New!” features here and there for most BB software. Wouldn’t that then destroy the purpose of BP?
This far into this blabbering i want to remind you that this isn’t a rant. I’m simply asking because i don’t understand. Not getting it is quite the itch! You’ve made BP do what it does damn well. The question just is; who needs what it does? Obviously, i don’t know whether i do or not yet.
Did you make BP simply to attract users of WP to a facebook-clone because of its mere potential or did you have a spark of genius with an actual passion behind it to add something to WP that you deemed truly necessary, or solving a general problem with all community software, or something else that neither of us understand?
I hope that nobody is feeling offended by my post. I have absolutely no intentions at all to insult or to judge. I’m simply trying to figure out a rubrics cube with black-and-white goggles on.
