They are usually cluttered with distracting animated gifs, elaborate signatures and tons of useless stats about the posters (novice/expert level, im status, joining date, etc.)

They are notoriously cumbersome to navigate, let alone find what you need. The forum administrators and moderators know it, so most forums use stickies as a band-aid. For the casual visitor, stickies are usually road signs that tell you where to look for certain things, a summary of important points or FAQs. Needless to say, they’re pretty effective when you compare them with the rest of the mess, but a band-aid nonetheless.

I’d blame the user interface for this awkward communication medium. It’s not so much due to its age, because I’d rather read stuff on old skool NNTP with vi key bindings than to navigate these forums. Rather, it’s the constant need for paging (displaying page 1 of 32!!), which means that you can’t effectively use the browser’s in-page find feature. Search is usually broken or otherwise less than relevant. No threading, nor ability to easily filter messages. I could go on.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of tweaking the skin and applying sane user interface design. Certainly, there are some better-designed forums out there that are less painful to use. I haven’t seen much innovation in that area in a long time, actually not since my first encounter with them. I suspect people actually like and have come to expect those cumbersome features.

Forum communities are an entire subculture of their own, and I don’t expect a shift anytime soon. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if we can do better.

₁ In case you’re wondering, I intentionally used the word “forums” instead of “fora”.

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It didn’t take long for me to find out that this affinity is uni-directional. RTM’s seeming openness is only superficial.

The story began almost a year ago.

I have been using MojiPage (my startup) daily for checking weather, reading news, and interacting with social media sites. Knowing that RTM has an API (who doesn’t these days?), I thought to myself: “how great would it be if I could write an RTM widget for MojiPage?”

So, I looked up what I need to achieve the idea, and found out that RTM issues API keys to non-commercial developers, but commercial arrangement is possible with prior arrangement. Quoting their API page:

The Remember The Milk API allows anyone to write applications that interact with Remember The Milk. At this time, the API is available for non-commercial use by outside developers (however, commercial use is possible by prior arrangement). The design of the Remember The Milk API was inspired by the Flickr API.

I’m not averse to working out an arrangement with RTM. Given that the Flickr API had similar licensing restrictions and yet they granted us a license, I couldn’t imagine it’ll be too much of a problem. So, I applied for an API key outlining my proposal to RTM.

A day, two days, god knows how many days passed.. no response.

Thinking that my message could have ended up in their spam box, I re-applied for it. Again, weeks passed without any answer, not even an acknowledgement email. I cannot recall if there was a third message that I sent, but I also tried calling the number gotten from their domain whois record, only to reach a voicemail box always. Leaving voicemail didn’t elicit any response either.

Now, I can understand that RTM is a subscription-based service, and they need to protect their revenue stream but is a response too much to ask?

For this reason, I’m migrating my personal TODO list over to Evernote, which looks more feature-complete over what RTM offers. I’m looking forward to it.

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A pact between the French Government, French ISP’s and the local music and film industry will see French users who download material from P2P networks losing their internet access.

French internet users will face a three strikes and you’re out policy, according to the NY Times. Users will receive a warning for each illegal download before losing their service on the third infringement.

NO, INTERNET?! That’s human cruelty! I’ll go with decapitation, thanks!

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After dinner we went back to the Coffee Alchemy roastery, I did not miss the chance to get a bag of freshly roasted coffee beans, which means I can dump the almost-stale batch that I bought before I left for my US trip. If you’re in Australia, you owe it to yourself to try one of her blends, I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

The downer of the day had to be getting a parking fine right in front of my place, which used to be a free-parking zone until two days ago when they decided to put the 2P restrictions in place. Thanks a lot, I do not remember being notified of this by post or otherwise. I’ll be sending a letter of appeal tomorrow, they will not get a dime from me.

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