Kate Guttridge: Web Information Sharing Project (WHISPER)

Comment boards and discussion forums are becoming the norm on many web pages these days. With various types of functions these comment boards and forums bring up some important questions as to what people generally want to and will comment on, on a particular website. In an attempt to discover the answers to these questions we designed and implemented a comment board for the Hypertext 2004 Conference website. The comment board was intended to allow conference attendees to communicate in an open forum about such issues as conference programs, papers, and travel. Additionally, the comment board provided an opportunity to research how people respond to the capability of commenting on all aspects of a website, from a paragraph to an entire page.

The comment board went live on the Hypertext 2004 website (www.ht04.org) on July 27, 2004. This experiment generated many issues that were not heavily considered during the development of the comment board. One such issue was the lack of an editorial policy for the comment board. By failing to have a published editorial policy, the website was open to posts of any nature, and the site administrators had no stated right to remove any posts deemed inappropriate. second issue that surfaced during this experiment was the lack of any security or validation features. Essentially, any user was able to type in any name into the author field, and there was no check for authenticity of the author's identity. The board was used to make a specific personal issue made known to the entire conference. Instead of being used by everyone to discuss topics, the board was used by the minority to try to get their opinions heard. The end result was a board that went generally unused by the community of people seeing the board everyday and in the best position to use it.