Why The Cellar?

[elSicomoro]

God...I'm an ass! How could I have forgotten about Pittsburgh? Apologies to our western neighbors.

Dham, that was funny. I didn't even think about the number of posts...heh.

You forgot something though...

"Where you from?"

"Bawlmer, hon."

"BAL-ti-MORE?"

"Yeah, Bawlmer, hon."

Rho properly pronounces her hometown's name, and I must admit, the first time I heard a native pronounce it, it was damn funny. Granted, it's not like they all pronounce it that way, but it is amusing. Sort of like some St. Louisians calling a sink a "zink" and "warshing" clothes, not "washing" them. Shit, I'm guilty of "warshing."

god. "warshing." man, that drives me nuts. megan says that. i make fun of her. tee hee. i'm such a nice guy. "gotta warsh the dishes." ugh.

[BrianR]

Jacksonville, Fla. Or am I still from Philly?

I tend to think of myself as being "from" wherever I'm located at that time.
I even pick up the local accents to some extent. I'm developing a touch of Southern Accent as long as I'm down here.

See y'all later

Brian

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by dhamsaic

"ballmer. BALL MER."

"baltimore?"

"yeah, ballmer."

hehe.

Not to be confused with the big city further north, "Fluffiya". You know, where the Iggles play.

Brian, don't feel bad about "y'all"...southern accents are *highly* contagious. One month in Memphis was long enough to make me completely unintelligible up here. Actually a couple hours worth of Shakespeare will have me speaking in Elizabethan cadences, too...

Just work on your prounoun formation. To spice it up, you can add a Texas accent:

Second person singular: "Y'all"

Second person plural: "*all* y'alls"

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by MaggieL
Brian, don't feel bad about "y'all"...southern accents are *highly* contagious. One month in Memphis was long enough to make me completely unintelligible up here. Actually a couple hours worth of Shakespeare will have me speaking in Elizabethan cadences, too...

I spent 3 semesters in the pseudo-South (southeastern Missouri) going to school. They have some of the thickest drawls I've heard to date, other than folks from Louisiana. When I moved back to St. Louis, it took a while to get rid of the slight twang. One of my friends said that I sounded like a cross between a Southerner and a surfer. *shrugs*

Every once in a while, someone from here in Philadelphia says that I have an accent. Not a twang, but that it's just "different." The funny thing is now, when I listen to my mother talk, she sounds like SHE has an accent. I don't think the way I talk has changed at all since moving to the East Coast...at least I don't THINK so. St. Louisans generally do not have an accent, with the exception of some folks on the South Side (see my previous post here) and those out in the rural sections of the area (about 40 miles out of the city). The only other city I've been to that seems devoid of accents in general is Washington.

[lisa]

Well, Philadelphians DO have accents too. I didn't know this until I was about 20, but my brother (who was taking speaking classes) pointed out a few examples:

What philadelphians drink from the tap: wooder

What philadelphians dry themselves with after they shower: tal

What philadelphians put in a shortcake: strawbries

The full name of a philadelphian called Tony: Antny

The plural in philadelphia of you: youz

And, of course, we can't forget the proverbial "Yo!" which has since been kinda nationalized.

[Dafydd Wynne-Evans]

Why?

I happened upon this board when FARK linked to it, a couple weeks ago (?)

I like what I see, and since your membership requirements are so forgiving, I decided to quit lurking and join up.

Where (am I located/from)?

Minneapolis Minnesota/Ellsworth Wisconsin.

[Scopulus Argentarius]

I first noticed it via a picture of the day through Fark.

I looked up the url and poked around and discovered I really like the Cellar; it is a throw-back to the polite days of the early eighties when I was BBSing around town. (Back then, we didn't know what a flame-war was if it burned our undershorts ... like I stated, I was from a polite group of technocrats)

The general character of its Regular Participants is rare and good and something that had been missing in my life for a while.

Cellar..Rock On...*snif* *snif*.... :-)

[alleycat]

hi y'all. virgin post here.

just ran across an old bookmark i had laying around (most likely from an iotd link on /.)

been lurking a couple days and just having this cellar grow on me. it just utterly makes sense that this grew out of one of the old dial-up bbs systems. god, i spent a lot of time on those (chicago area, tho.)

i'd thought this sort of thing had been buried by the yahoos and /.'s long ago. who's running it? tony? if so, thanks, tony.

[Undertoad]

np, alley, welcome. To say that the place reflects on the old BBSing days is... well, something I'll probably steal for the tagline at some point, because it's damn hard to describe the place.

[alleycat]

it's a cool thing you have here. not unlike what i have (had?) in mind for one i'm starting to crank up.

but i doubt it can be reproduced (and that would be pointless anyway). i hope my site can get something of this flavor tho, if i ever get it off the ground.

you all have a gem here. be careful with it.

[alleycat]

btw, forgot to mention (definitely not in order of importance)

1) if you can "steal" something out of that for the tagline... make hay while the sun shines. i won't rain on the parade.

2) "damn hard to describe the place" is a definition of success as i gauge it. of course, my gauges aren't attuned to the rest of the world (as i've found, usually to my chagrin), so ymmv.

3) i find it interesting that i want to advertise the cellar, but only to people i like. which is pretty funny, given that i probably got the link from a posting on /., which means it's been harvested by every search engine in the friggin' world. of course the flipside of that is that <b>normal</b> people don't read slashdot. frankly, i'm not sure why i still bother.

fwiw

btw, apropos of little or nothing, this is a pretty kickass piece of forum software. i'll have to check it out - i know i saw a link there somewhere

alley - this is the thread for you

the cellar definitely is something special. i find myself in the same boat as you - i want to advertise it, but only to people i like. i'm not sure if this is cheating tony out of people or not. for now, i'm pretty open whereever i go about how much i like the cellar - that's because the readership of my general postings is generally pretty low. i want people to be here, but i don't want it to be another slashdot. we had our first "spam" here a few weeks ago, and there was a post a week or so after that with the infamous goatse guy. but i don't think that those alone will ruin it. i hope nothing ever does.

[Undertoad]

The forum software, vBulletin, is getting popular. This place is mostly generic vBulletin. My theory is that you stick with close to the default so people only have to learn the software once. You should be able to use any other vBulletin software out there if you use one vBulletin-based system.

Unfortunately most site operators believe that they are more special if they customize the hell out of it. But the features are so well thought-out that any customization beyond style is likely to break a very good concept of how this stuff is supposed to operate.

It's the people who make a forum special but bad software can definitely get in the way!

[Nic Name]

Arriving through intellectual pursuit, I came to the cellar in search of "community" on the Internet.

I hung around, I think, in large part because of the real sense of community I found at cellar.org. Not that everybody is a buddy. Everyone is not cut from the same cloth or wears the same stripe. It's not a club: it's a community.

It's interesting to me that this thread, Why The Cellar?, even exists ... to pose the questions: how did you get here? why do you stay? It's telling that this thread was started by a member of the community, not the founder.

I'm interested in the Internet as a communications medium for relationship-based enterprises. Community building is critical.

For a long time, I've been a disciple of Powazek, who recently published Design for Community. Derek's one of those friggin' geniuses you meet from time to time, and might never have met, but for the net.

Recently, Powazek wrote an essay on his book's companion website, titled Seven sites doing it right. Among those sites recommended by the guru for doing interesting things with community features, was Kuro5hin.org. When Powazek said to visit K5 "with your brain on" I was intrigued, and had an irresistible urge to explore for myself.

Off to K5, I started looking for a community doing interesting things with community features. On my first visit, I found a post by someone who also appeared to have his brain on ... Wondertoad. (Wonder who that is? Little did I know.) This toad's post indicated to me a deep appreciation for the subject of my quest.

It is well worth reproducing here:

K5 working as designed (4.40 / 10) (#101)
by Wondertoad on Mon May 21st, 2001 at 05:01:22 PM EST
http://cellar.org/

As someone who's run various online communities for 15 years, there's nothing wrong with K5.

The biggest problem that I can see is that while K5 asserts itself as a site where the community runs things, at a certain size there truly can be no "community". In the real world, a village becomes a town, a town becomes a city, and suddenly instead of having 1/100th of the pie, you have 1/1000000th of the pie.

There can be no community of over, let's say... about 1,000 users. Past that point, you have some users who are more active than the rest, giving it a community-like feel, but the lesser members are really left out in the cold.

Part of the sense of the word "community" is that it's more human. A community cares for its members, sometimes even nurtures them. The failing of the online community is that it doesn't nurture anyone. For 99.99999% of /. and K5 users, if they died -- the worst thing that could happen to them -- you wouldn't even know.

In fact, at a certain point, each additional user is a burden to a community. The community sense of the site would be greater if that person did not exist.

And so, for any successful site, complex moderation systems can keep the quality of the posts high, but cannot return that community "feel" to the site as it originally existed. There's nothing that can be done about this; it just IS. If you really want community, go elsewhere. (Blatant plug: my own cellar.org is small enough to maintain a community feel...)

I *think* that what K5 still gets you is an online forum that has a strong sense of fairness, a group that values critical thinking and originality. And even if K5 cannot care for its users, and other K5 users cannot care for its users, you know that K5 users care about K5. This is much less possible at /., where the posting system echoes the old broadcast model because stories are choisen by the elite few and broadcast to the many. To put it another way, on /. the comments are from the bazaar, while the stories, polls, editorializing and section choices are definitely from the cathedral. On K5, the stories and polls are also from the bazaar. Huge difference! On K5, I know that the stories were important to a healthy subset of the K5 user base. On /., I know that the stories were important to the submitter, the editor... and maybe no-one else. If the editor is an idiot, the site reflects that!
--
The Cellar - because conversations don't happen on K5

Immediately, I ran to the cellar and registered my nic name.

It's great to be part of a community, where everybody knows your name.

Cheers,

Nic

(even if it's not your real name)

PS: Now I'm off to recommend cellar.org to Powazek's list of sites doing interesting things with community.

PPS: Your community is a precious thing. It's yours. Don't let interlopers screw it up for you. CitizenXit

PPPS: More sounds from Cheers.

Sam ... "You are the nuttiest, the stupid, the phoniest fruitcake I ever met."
Diane ... "You, Sam Malone, are the most arrogant, self-centered --"
Sam ... "Shut Up! Shut your fat mouth."
Diane ... "Make me."
Sam ... "Make you? My God, I'm, I'm gonna, I"m gonna bounce you off every wall in this office."
Diane ... "Try it and you'll be walking funny tomorrow, or should I say funnier."
Sam ... "You know, you know I always wanted to pop you one, maybe this is my lucky day huh?"
Diane ... "You disgust me, I hate you."
Sam ... "Are you as turned on as I am?"
Diane ... "More."