Community vs Client

[butterfly_kisses]

that's a very good point, ethen as a matter of fact you all make very good points. so to sum up it looks like the general concensus (agreement) so far is that a quality client with a huge userbase and quality content is more important than a "sense of helping others"?

Originally posted by Ethen
"the old "kazaa community" and neighborhood i.e., "the message board" there before Sharman took them down....how important is it to the success of a client to have some way for users to interact with each other and that also goes for what we have here at the Napsterites forum..."

For P2P developers, the last thing they think about when coding is adding in fancy communitys. After all they are pointless.

I mean its a waste of the projects bandwidth, to set up a forum where newbies can be chastized like crazy, and it gets filled with long winded religious rants, poetry and other off topic crap.

Then there is the trolling, and other non sense. Whats really worse off then the above points is a community is only good for customer support. The thing a community could be useful for is finding and exchanging file names and file types. Hooking each other up with the magic goods.

But that is also the first thing any file shareing app rules out, as its a huge legal burden to have floating around. With "No warez" as a rule what able body file sharer is gonna stick around?

Get real. Even as tech support places they often provide the lowest level of all tech support. New findings show for software applications, forums are not reccomended. Its a cheap scape goat.

The only real useful tool providers can stick in is a stable form of chat, If some one wants to get help they can, or if you need to know a correct movie size, you can also.

Although my guess is with movie sizes, as ideas improve people will use tools like indy's sig to dat more and more, or as web sites devoted to file sizes come about more and more, people will utilize those un offical mediums.

If people want close groups of unique little communities, they can ad will often form them on the web and in other ways. Those looking for P2P discussion, already have hundreds of good portals on the very topic. Napsterites is one.

You saw how great the KaZaA forums where timmy. The idea of repeating that mess is a joke, and no developers in their right mind would repeat it as a viable and important part of an application.

I think as groups like the RIAA try and pull more people into court rooms, a day will come when they realize its a waste and just start targeting on a user basis. If a day like that ever came the last thing you want is messages time stamped and marked with your ISP details showing a history of your file sharing escapades.

To sum it all up, having a forum developer run thats a vital community has little revelence to the software itself. It often is an add on freak show.

Show me one forum that has no moderation, that is run by a software company and hasn't degraded into a nut house.

Community is still important, but there are better ways of having a community and in other formats.