I got to hand out a few business cards today, so possibly some
introductions are in order.

First, this is an incomplete installation
of Wirebird.Gamehawk (that would be why I'm handing out bidness cards,
y'all). For another, slightly different iteration (going for more of
the webforum flavor), you can visit The Phoenyx,
http://www.phoenyx.net/ .

The Phoenyx is the driving force behind
Wirebird, but Wirebird is intended as a general-purpose package. I'm
writing it as if (1) it's going to be installed across the entire
Internet, and (2) it's going to run some big sites. Neither of these
may happen, but it's better than not planning for it and having it
happen (*coughphpBBsecuritycough*.

To make a long story short, what's
happening here is that you can treat it as a majordomo-ish mail server
(send mail to join+gamehawk@ to subscribe to this list), or you can
treat it as a webforum, or when I teach the nntp server to talk to
something other than XNews (can I help it if nobody else's nntp client
is RFC-compliant?) as a newsgroup, or as a news feed (though I won't
vouch for the accuracy of anything but the topic-level RSS feeds just
at this moment).

Or, and here's where it gets fun, you can treat it as
a REST API and write your own client. In JavaScript, or as a standalone
client, or whatever. It speaks HTML and JSON right now, and I'll add
output flavors as I get the time/inclination/request.

My intention is
to write a baseline version that can run in Apache with minimal
modification (e.g. on a hosting service where you might not have any
choice about your config), and that looks good and works completely in
Lynx, and that can be used in a vanilla email client (but someone needs
to write a bells-n-whistles Thunderbird plugin anyway). And then I'm
gonna layer it in JavaScript, and then I'm going to write a client that
bypasses it all, and then... well, unless I've gotten help doing all
that, and then I'm going to die of old age.

So who's the first
volunteer?