Fuzzy Thoughts

Now I don’t know how I came up with the idea, but I did. While at work, I thought that there should be a site where college students can talk with each other in a private forum. It would kind of be like facebook, but wouldn’t be as “busy” as facebook. Busy as in the amount of stuff you can do. Hopefully there would be a good amount of traffic; at least enough to use most of 2GB of bandwidth a month.

One of the things that I would like to do that would set this apart from facebook would be allow only the students to participate in the discussions; schools’ staff wouldn’t know what parties were being planned out and be ready to bust them because they won’t be able to see any of the discussions. Of course, this presents a problem: how the hell do I pull that off. The easiest way would seem to be chainging permissions so new members can’t see a thing, and have established members vouch for the new ones and then place them into a new group that has the right permissions set.

At first I thought about only having the site be a resource for college kids, but then I thought high school students could also use it as a place to get help in the college search. But then the question is do I make them a member of the same groups as college kids (and thus see the same things) or do I make them their own group and set it so they only see a limited part of the site?

I don’t even know what I’d call the new site yet; although I did have a few ideas… First there was quchat, but I think people from other schools would feel excluded. Then there was cyberquad…and then equad…but both of those are already registered.

Most of the site is already developed (redesign of mine), but some things would obviously need to be changed…colors, pages, links, etc., but the layout and css coding os already done for the most part (some css will have to be changed).

It’ll be interesting to see how this ends. I want to talk with some people about what they think of the idea, and of course I need to get a few people to help me run the forum. If I were to go through with this, I’d love to get it done in time for school to start again. The way the rest of my sumer is scheduled, that could definitely happen. Most of the coding could be done on the way to NOAC, along with talking the idea over with others. I also need to figure out a way to pay for the hosting (unless I use a subdomain instead of buying a new name). Hosting with geeks cost about $75 a year, and I really don’t want to spend $150 a year to pay for hosting. The site right now doesn’t use much bandwidth, so it would be possible for me to just use a subdomain.

Oh well, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens over the course of the next couple of months.

Leave comments about what your thoughts are. Is this a good idea? Would you be interesting in joining?