Quote from: Zahlen on January 30, 2014, 02:01:42 AM

Quote from: QBTC on January 28, 2014, 09:45:36 PM

Quote from: Zahlen on January 28, 2014, 08:52:46 PM

There's a lot that could be done to help with communication. Instead of just a traditional forum (section -> thread -> post), there could additionally be support for the following, e.g.

-instead of giant quote pyramids, there could be slashdot/reddit tree-style threads.
-people like salsa, pin and joefox are making regular aggregator link posts, which is great. Even better if these could be stickied. Better still imo, if the most important links and their description could be displayed directly, instead of having to go into the stickied post to find them. Basically, the more important and/or the more people it involves, the more visible it should be.
-more options to customize what you want to follow than just a watchlist. Maybe a reddit style way of assembling favourite subreddits. Maybe topic tags for threads and posts.
- I've mentioned summary and definitions of technical terms before. Maybe a small, fixed frame/window for summary of the ongoing discussion (update permissions decided by topic starter say?) Mouseover technical terms/acronyms to get definitions (maybe these could be databased in our wiki? What do you think joe?)
- maybe integration of real-time communication tools like gdocs or the old Google Wave, or at least a chatbox.
- personally, I'd love LaTeX support so that I can write math using less English

Lots of possibilities. But most importantly, the site admins and devs need to experiment with ideas like this and interfaces. Find out what works best for most folks.

nxtcrypto, are you guys (or anyone else) up for this? I don't know web coding, so even though I suggest all this, I can't help with the implementation Sad

I can do interface mockups though. And the LaTeX support part, if you guys are interested in adding that, I can help. Let me know.

www.nxtcrypto.org here. Trying to understand exactly what you are wanting? We do have a forum and wiki going on. Give me more specifics about what you're thinking before I can say yes or no.

Hey QBTC, great work with the site

It'll take a lot of time for me to expand on all of this (and other ideas). I'll slowly post about them in the nxtcrypto form META section over the next few days. But for starters, I'll talk a bit about LaTeX support (the last item):

LaTeX is a markup language, like HTML and wiki markup, it's used to format rather than to program. It's mainly used for typesetting. It does a fantastic job of displaying math expressions, so it's used by a lot of scientists, mathematicians and CS people. Compare for instance, the math expressions in here vs the math in this post I just made.

Wikipedia, Wordpress and some forums support LaTeX. joefox says he's going to try to support it in the wiki too.

The links I've shown support LaTeX by converting the expressions in LaTeX syntax into image files. There are scripts that do this. (Don't have links to them handy, ask me if you want them.) It's commonly used, so you can find a lot of help with getting it set up. But this approach has some drawbacks: expressions can't be copied, and the size of images messes up the separation between lines. All this may not be a big deal. Another much more slick approach is MathJax which renders expressions using fonts! This requires Javascript to be activated though.

EDIT: I've just replied to ~5 posts from across dozens of pages in this megathread, all the while going back through the thread (and all the quote pyramids and different convos...) to reference stuff. That's the current communications burden...

The possibility to use LaTeX with JavaScript could be put into the www site. I'm not sure of the purpose. As of now the site is not open for contributors other than myself. It might serve your goals better on the forums or wiki where contributors may want to share mathematical expressions. It's a great idea for the right place. I look forward to hearing more!