PTT in Close Shot (4)

To What Ends is PTT a Valuable Site?

Without much thinking, so far PTT seems to be rather welcoming and public, because of the false impression given by its overwhelming flow of information/popularity. In fact, PTT is more of a guarded office building, with thousands of semi-public, semi-private conference rooms and personal offices. Why is PTT guarded? Well, first of all, even though the threshold for registration is pretty low, one still needs a registered membership to participate the discussions/activities inside the giant building. Otherwise, holding a guest ID will only allow people to have accesses to those conference rooms--that is, the so-called "public boards" in PTT, and no participation is permitted as well. Thus I am more like to think of them as "semi-public, semi-private", in spite of the fact that they are labeled as "public". Second, even if one has a registered ID, the complicated layout of PTT's forums/boards (the conference rooms and personal offices) makes it rather hard to navigate unless the person knows exactly what he/she is looking for. That means, the enormous amount of boards somehow creates a veil which helps to make some of the forums/boards "invisible" (they are open forums, but one has to find/locate them). This kind of forums often belongs to the category of personal offices; by personal offices I refer to those forums that are opened up because of a more personal, or relatively minor purposes. Course boards, class boards, alumni boards, group boards (school teams, clubs) and family/friend boards are some examples of this kind of forums. Third, the navigating system of BBS is so different and seemingly old as well as difficult (compared to the web world), that many people are blocked out from the very beginning.

So, indeed PTT isn't all that public, and that is why when people talk about how to maximize the value and potential of PTT, the discussions are often surrounding a main idea: to open up PTT. That direction is not surprising at all; while the web world has reached a stage of wed 2.0, and reached the preview and imagination of 3.0 or even 5.0, PTT still stays in the building. It actually has tried to join the worldwide flow, by opening up some new accesses to its offices. The web PTT has been launched for couple years, but not all the contents inside PTT are instantly transited to the website, probably due to some concerns about PTT users' rights and privacy. What's more, the web PTT is at most a set of archives; it follows the "read logic" but not the "read/write logic" of the Internet nowadays. People cannot make posts or comments or any other similar services that are provided by the telnet PTT. In this sense, this web version of PTT doesn't really take the step to make meaningful connections with the web. It is also possible to gain timely update of the posts in certain boards via RSS, or Atom feed. However, for some technical reasons this function does not work very smoothly, according to the feedback I found on the web.

(By the way, there is a site: "gaaan.com" established for the purpose of copying the entire package of a BBS site onto the web. It looks a lot like a BBS site and it offers a dual way to navigate--either to use the mouse or the traditional way in a real BBS site. Type "guest" into the blank and take a look! It's quite fun!)

Obviously there is still quite some room for PTT to improve in terms of opening itself up. The most frequently mentioned issue is concerning the search function. Many people have been complaining that despite the abundance of quality articles in PTT, it is easily for good articles (in the form of posts) to disappear in the daily wave of new posts, if the forum manager doesn't put them into the edited dossier. Also, search engines cannot find the articles in PTT; they can find the ones in the web PTT, but those are almost invisible (after flipping through many pages of search results, and there they are! Voila!). It means that it requires one to narrow down the search domain (for example: add "site:PTT.cc") for the contents in PTT to jump out immediately. But, to think that way is walking backward. Not many people would make their search terms so strict to simple one site unless they know beforehand exactly what they are looking for.

Before I go into the topic of promoting PTT's articles in the search results I want to talk more about the search issue. Lots of voices are asking for a way to search the contents in BBS sites. Actually, a search engine for BBS sites is already out there: YouSee. This site is built up by a group of graduate students, aimed to search the posts, comments, or other traces ONLY in BBS sites. At first it stepped on the stage with confidence and lots of cheering, but within a week, it was forced to stop operating and modified the range its search engine could reach.

Why? Well, the biggest controversy in the whole YouSee event is the privacy issue. As I mentioned before, the number of forums in PTT and the special way of navigation in a way have woven a seeming veil that creates a false impression of being invisible for the PTT users. This illusion further helps to fertilize a prevailing assumption about PTT's "privateness" which is different from that about the world wide web. Under such assumption, many users forget about the possibility of being watched, especially in those "personal offices". Yes, they might be unnoticed, but in the digital age, everything leaves some traces. So soon lots of people found out that the launch of YouSee was not merely non-beneficial but might also be harmful. This search engine offered a strong service that enabled people to find articles that were hidden behind the enormous newer posts in the forum, to find posts in both public boards as well as the "personal offices" (class boards, friend boards, and so on), and to search for the same key term across several BBS sites. The overwhelming search function of YouSee suddenly exposed everything to the ground, and simplified the ways to access the data that might not be so easy to get before. That made lots of BBS users very uncomfortable and some old histories were dug out and led to some harm. In the end, YouSee was suspended for some time and now its search engine only covers the BBS sites or the forums that have agreed to be included into the index. Isn't that interesting to see how the assumptions vary with different social media, and that people are so prone to be trustful with the Internet? (Uh, including me.)