h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Changing the central focus of h2g2 is going to be a bad idea. You'll lose those of us who have been around a long time, and, unless you've managed to magically find a niche that hasn't already been filled (Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube etc.), you won't get any new blood, and that's the important bit.

One of the best parts of this site is it's anonymity. I interact with people here based solely on what they write. I've got ages wrong, genders confused- but that's okay.
If Spaces are given the ability to hold more information, or, say, if you give the facility for a 'Photo, Biography, Interests' sort of format, people will end up adhering to that format. It sounds a very small thing, but people will come here and expect it to be like Facebook or some such, and, in time, it will turn into it.

One of the main problems now is that there isn't the critical mass in Peer Review for it to function properly (or so I've heard). There are less articles on the Front Page than there used to, there is a shortage of Subs (again, so I believe) and people are burdening themselves with trying to keep it alive, and burning themselves out. What we need is more people like us. We just need to find them. *How* we find them is of course, the tricky part. Maybe advertisements in fan magazines could bring in the sci-fi element, but really we need more writers. Again, not sure how to get them.

Okay, I'll try and answer some of your questions in a less muddled way:

*In the forward-thinking spirit of Douglas Adams, how can we move h2g2 forward, make it technologically pioneering again?
- I don't think you can, but, more importantly, you don't need to. The site needs to get fixed up (see other people's comments about the search facility and so on), but it doesn't need a complete overhaul. It's fine as it is. As long as you keep up to date with the different mediums that will access it, such as PDAs and mobiles, then there is no need.

*In your ideal wishlist, what would you like to see on h2g2?
- Simply more people writing. That's what we need. And more people writing the really zany articles. Mine are all boring, so I can't talk though. I don't want a mass of people who are here to 'network'.

*What would you like to do with your Personal Space that you can't do now?
- Nothing. I specifically *don't* want: photos, biography sections, animations, customisation.

*Do you think a name change would affect the site? What would you change the name to?
- h2g2 is a bit clunky to say. I tend to say hootoo in real speech. Maybe it's time for a new name, but I can't think of anything good. Maybe just 'The Guide'. And when people ask 'The Guide to what?' you can easily say 'Life, the Universe, and Everything...'

* What do you think about h2g2 becoming, in conjunction with the Edited Guide, a more obvious place where kindly internet geeks interact with kindly BBC geeks to swap ideas, software, coding etc?
- Much I have no problem with interaction, there are plenty of places on the Web where people can swap ideas and such. There's the Programmers Corner here, and maybe it would be worth giving your 'kindly BBC Geeks' an h2g2 account and getting them subscribed to the page in a semi-official manner, but I wouldn't orientate the site that way. A very small percentage of h2g2 users are programmers. I guess in short, yes for interaction, but there's already the facility to do that on h2g2 anyway. You could always just formally adopt Programmers Corner, or a similar page.


* Would you like much more say in how your page looked? Or the way the front page/the whole site looked?
- No. Keep them basic and standardised, as I think I already said. We're here to write, not to look pretty. You've already got four skins. Oooh, as an aside, make Plain a proper, standard skin. I use it permanently- it's a lovely skin and a lot of people could use it if it came down in the drop down box in Preferences. It was never released properly, but I haven't come across any bugs in it for aaaaaages.

*Collaboration is key to h2g2: would you be interested in collaborating on musical projects, film etc? Stuff you create at home but then swap and develop here?
- Like the Aviators have done? Perhaps, but I can't see the appeal myself. There's few enough people writing entries as it is. Let people set up a page if they feel the need, and link to it from the Front Page if it seems like a good idea.


*Do you use social networking sites, such as Facebook or myspace? Do you think we can learn from them?
- I've got a Facebook account, but I don't do anything with it. I don't understand why it's interesting, so I'm not a good person to ask. There seems to be no purpose to it; here we have a goal and that's what keeps us together.

Basically, I think what I'm saying is, h2g2 can do a lot of things. Lots of things that people might want - you mentioning the BBC/Programmers collaboration, for eaxmple - can already be done. Editable pages would just make us a poor relation of Wikipedia.

Ideas:

1. Fix what's broken.
2. Find a way to market the site to pull in more writers.
3. *Don't* try to copy anyone else. You'll just end up as a less popular version of what you are trying to emulate.


Hope that's of use, Towers.

I'd agree with the Princess - many people on h2g2 prize the anonimity the site provides, and I've been amazed at the sensitivity shown on issues like self harm and illness.

At the same time we have a nazi approach to txtspk - so maybe we aren't that tolerant, or maybe we all just prize English too much.

The only thing I'd rally like is an edit facility so I could correct the mistypes in my posts.

(I know preview is my friend.)

Part of me agrees about the edit facility, but actually I think not having it is a good idea. Most of us would go back to correct out spelling and grammar (), but some could use it to go back and rewrite what they said totally (say, if they were losing an argument).
I've written a lot of posts here that I look back and cringe about, especially in my early days, but I don't think an edit function would be a good idea.

A delete function, on the other hand, might be good.

We are a site that prides itself on its communication, so having a limited tolerance to netspeak/textspeak is a good thing, I would think. But then, I'm one of the intolerant so I would say that.

It's weird to hear me being called 'The Princess' after all these years, McKay.

How about a simple spell-checking option instead of edit? We are not all native English speakers after all

I know I could use one

Hmm, yes, that might be a nice idea.

A spell check? Which version should it be and does it need American English, English, Aus/NZ English, Canadian English etc, etc?

A spell check can be as simple as installing a Google tool bar up there^^^ on your PC. I have it and it does a half reasonable job and I think people who post with appalling spelling errors are just plain lazy anyway.
The Guide is not going to allow spelling errors in, so it's a facility only to be used for conversations surely.

I just used the Google spell check and it picked out my use of the abbreviation "Aus".

British English. As that's the "Official" language of hootoo, as mentioned in the writing guidelines.

Yep, cool. No problems with B.E., just the need for a spell check option in here. When it's so easy to have one in your toolbar anyway.
If Hootoo needs some tarting up then I reckon there are better things to introduce than a spellcheck.

To be honest, I can see both sides of the argument. I think a spellchecker would be good, so I downloaded the spellchecker add-on for Firefox...

I had that at one stage but it lent heavily towards American English whilst the one I have now is less so.

See - you can't go back and edit my memory - whenever I see vip I automatically translate it.

Yes I can see that people might go back and change the meaning of things said previously - but we'd all know what a knob they were if they did - Then again we usually do anyway.

I'm also totally against txtspeak - I'm also on a football fansite, and that ignores txtspeak too - we've had some success with getting younger fans to write in English by ignoring gibberish. We just say we're too old to understand it.

1. Fix what's broken.
That's the search, for a start. If searching slows down the database too much, could you create a second, backup database just for the search, and update this second database once every twenty-three hours or something? So the search would be a bit out of line, and wouldn't find the most recent posts, but would still basically work.

Also the skins. I use brunel, but it would be nice to see some of the newer functions which work only in brunel translated to the other skins. Specifically, sometimes I'm on a slow connection, and I'd like to use plain, but I can't function without the "X new posts" link in my conversation list.

(While we're talking about skins, could we please have that XML skin we were talking about on the DNA Hub a few years ago? Then individual users could create their own local skins as browser plugins, if they were geeky enough.)

It would be nice to integrate some of the Aviators stuff into h2g2 itself. The independent Aviators site will continue to develop: Rich is sparking off all sorts of ideas, some of which I may even be capable of implementing, but ideally the videos and audio would be integrated to the entries they were created to complement, much as photos and other pictures are now.

2. Find a way to market the site to pull in more writers.
There have been a few suggestions in this forum for that. The Radio Times notion strikes me as one of the best. And then there's the simple option of changing some of the metatags. And my idea of having some of the UnderGuide stuff read on BBC 7.


3. *Don't* try to copy anyone else. You'll just end up as a less popular version of what you are trying to emulate.