Shall I Open a Shanghai BBS

Whenever I meet any tough decision related to this site, I turn to my readers to help me.

I am thinking of open a BBS to offer visitors another place to raise question. Thus if anyone has any question about Shanghai, they can just create a new topic. Currently, they have to select a topic I have created and post it there, or it will be off topic comment.

I have setup a forum at http://home.wangjianshuo.com/bbs, however, I didn’t kick off it yet. I know to start a forum is easy and to maintain is not. More efforts should be put into the forum to maintain it, to reply and to moderate it. So, I still not decided it yet. If I open it one day, it means I have committed it to keep it in the long run. The original PVGBBS (Pudong Airport BBS) was not a success story for me. The volume is not good. After my server migration, I didn’t move the old data to this new site yet. This is a sample of the commitment I have to make to run a BBS. Once a post is posted onto a forum, the post owner and the site owner share the ownership of the post. The site owner is expected (although not required by law) to take care of the post and to keep the URL to the post unchanged - in case there are references on other site to this entry. At least, the site owner should keep the post for reasonable long time. This is the responsibility the owner should have.

blogcn.com did very bad recently - to lose customer’s blogs and comments and shut down the service frequently. I am very careful for the decision to run hosted service (like BBS), since I don’t want to be another example of blogcn.com. Responsibility is yours no matter how big (like a BSP) or how small (like my BBS) you are.

P.S. 1

I am very surprised to see 37 comments on my last entry: Why I Don’t Have an English Name. Wow. A hot topic!

P.S. 2

If you see me going online, offline, online, offline, …. on MSN Messenger these days, don’t be surprised. I am in an environment where the wireless LAN is not stable. It seems to be running on a sin(x) curve. The indicator went from Low, to Very Low, to Limited or no connectivity, to No wireless network detected, and then to Limited or no connectivity, back to Very low, Low…. at a cycle of 3 minutes. So does my MSN Messenger. It automatically logon when network resumes and log off when connection lost.

P.S. 3

After several weeks in a big project, I found my planning skills greatly increased. I wasn’t able to plan things that is 3 days ahead, now I have to think about what I (and the implementation team) are doing the same day half a year later (that is 2005). Great. It is important to see progress everyday.

P.S. 4

Beijing is hot and wet these days, just like the rain season in Shanghai, if not hotter or wetter.

P.S. 5

I will move to Beijing Shangri-la Hotel from tomorrow. Byebye, Ressainanse, my favorite hotel in Beijing.