I'll address this to Floyd, since he seems the most involved in the management of the site, but anyone else on the theserverside team I would welcome replies from.

First, a word of praise. You guys have done a great job with this site. It is the first place I look for news, information, and ideas about Java. Whenever I get on the web, this and slashdot are the two places I look at first.

That actually leads in to my second comment, which is: have you all given any thought to open-sourceing the code that operates this site? And have you given any consideration to adding moderation "scoring" to people's posts, ala slashdot? I don't check the discussion forums as often as I might, and it is frequently because of the overwhelming quantity of posts. Many of them are informative, but some are less so. It would be great to give users a means to filter out some of the less relevant, helpful responses so that they could focus on the posts which people have spent time formulating.

John

John,

    Thanks for your praise and suggestions. We have thought of open sourcing the site, and it is something we may do in the next 6 months, but first there were a bunch of feature adds and environment issues we wanted to resolve before taking that course of action.

    As for the ranking, that is a feature we havn't considered. Before we get into ranking, there are a slew of other features we want to implement, like tree-display views of threads, email integration, etc. Its a good idea, but it may be a long time before we get to it. :)

thanks,

Floyd

Floyd,
     Thanks for the reply. I look forward to watching the progress of the site. Keep up the good work!

John