Could you use a distributed revision control system directly as a discussion board?
So I pull from a whole bunch of people who I think are worth reading, but I get everyone they pull from, so you can join if anyone invites you and if everyone stops pulling from you, you are dropped. I can edit comments, but everyone gets the history.
Mercurial with the GPG extension might suffice. You wouldn’t have the software enforce anything, you’d rely on the audit trail to catch people after the fact.
You need to make the reference point in both directions, I think—in other words, to follow up that comment with a pointer here.
That’s what I mean by “cumbersome”. :)
Could you use a distributed revision control system directly as a discussion board?
So I pull from a whole bunch of people who I think are worth reading, but I get everyone they pull from, so you can join if anyone invites you and if everyone stops pulling from you, you are dropped. I can edit comments, but everyone gets the history.
Mercurial with the GPG extension might suffice. You wouldn’t have the software enforce anything, you’d rely on the audit trail to catch people after the fact.
You could certainly do that, but having more layers of software take care of things is extremely helpful.
In fact, these days there are several wikis that use DVCSs as the backing store, and support offline editing and merging.