Frood's Webpage - O

Characterization of the community
BoredOfStudies.org is an online community and forum that provides study resources, study assistance, and a place to vent abåout issues and problems associated with secondary and undergraduate education. It is aimed at learners in Australia seeking to receive their åHigh School Certificate (HSC). It is a testament to their size and popularity that I found this in the first few pages while nosing around during Google searches.

History
“BoredOfStudies.org was created on March 5^th of 2002 by 4 former HSC students who had completed their HSC in the previous year. [snip] The Australian website provides notes free of charge to help students in their New South Wales HSC and Victorian VCE exams. The site's name is a parody of the NSW Board of Studies, the governing organisation for the HSC.”[1] It is a completely open community that actively helps members with homework and projects in a highly creative way.

In a most serendipitous manner, parodying of the Board of Studies has brought BoredOfStudies increasing fame. The Board of Studies issued an official bulletin that they were in no way affiliated with the online BoredOfStudies page vastly increasing exposure and popularity. Teachers are now regularly seen identifying BoredOfStudies as a useful tool.

Goals
BOS Mission Statement:
“Created by students, for students, Bored of Studies strives to provide current year 12 and year 11 students with all the resources and support they need to succeed during the 2 years that form the most important part of their education and subsequently, their futures.

Along with the help of countless user submitted notes and documents, and the users who spend endless hours helping out those in need in the student forums, Bored of Studies endeavours to become the single most influential, resourceful and helpful service available to students all over Australia.”[2]

Motivation?
The group is not affiliated with any organization nor is it sponsored by any. This allows the group to operate under its own loose code of ethics. Contrasting with the in-class penguin-oriented community that had tight reigns on what was allowed to occur, this community exercises minimalist moderation. In fact, there was no moderation that I encountered. This allows it to be more than just a place to find homework answers and paper suggestions; it becomes a place for critical and instantaneous peer-review. Discussions ensue from “which 2 famous biologists should I choose for a paper” to “what’s the highest place you’ve done it?”. There seem to be a perfectly reasonable number of off-topic[3] threads[4] probably resulting from a perfectly natural intrinsic need to vent.

There is no offline component to the group; it all happens in the great wide ether. Though I did not select another group to contrast it with I have been a member of various other groups such as bbs.legacycentral.org, a PHPbb group for discussion of repair, upgrades to, and procurement of used parts for my family’s 1993 Subaru Legacy. I have also been involved in oldcelicaclub.org, supras.com, and SOGI (Supra Owners Group International) mainly because I like to fiddle with things and fix them. Groups such as these and BOredOfStudies are places people can go to share their knowledge with others in need of information. If I hear a noise I’m unsure of or something on my car is in some state of disrepair and needs to be addressed, I search the forums then post[5] to the board. Similarly the BoredOfStudies group offers help when you’re in a tight spot or cannot figure out a homework assignment. Users post their issue and await a response. The deadline of the person to whom I responded had already passed, but the response had not yielded any fruitful responses. Thus, I posted a detailed solution to the problem at hand in the hopes that it would provide some help later down the line.

And this is an implied courtesy of lists[6]; one should always search the list’s history to be sure that the question you are posting about has not already been asked and answered in painful detail. A frequent newbie mistake is to post about an issue that is repeatedly addressed. One will usually receive a response like “Please search the forums before asking questions. <suchandsuch> did a detailed write-up of this here: [link to the article]” and then if the individual is a moderator, they will often close the thread to new posts.

Role of technology
Again, as addressed above the interface of the community is the bulletin board system which allows users to post to the forum to ask and answer questions. It also has incorporated its own internal Wiki that is devoted to storing and discussing notes about the HSC certification process in New South Wales.

There is an implied ‘status’ of sorts in groups such as this because users’ posts are tracked and displayed under their avatars[7]. That number of posts is interpreted automatically by the bulletin board system and translated at administrator-definable intervals as things like “newbie, recent addition, frequent contributor, veteran, and guru” so that as you post more and more, you ascent through the groups internal ranks.

Though groups such as these can be incredibly useful, as they grow and try to address all the needs of the community, they can become difficult to navigate. The hierarchical arrangement is usually designed by the administrator whose job it is to design meta-groupings of information. BoredOfStudies does a good job of appropriately categorizing information by first branching at the “Secondary”, and “Tertiary” study levels analogous to the “Secondary” and “University” levels here in America. The site then branches further into the various disciplines studies such as “Science”, “History”, etc. If this hierarchy is not well designed the site can become impossible to navigate, and the usership will decrease catastrophically. This is often self-correcting, because the administrator will invariably receive messages stating “this is dumb, you should do it this way.” Thus, a common impediment to the usability of a site is the involvement level of the administrators. If those that are chosen never fix problems with the site the users will migrate away. Having an administrator who quickly remedies problems is invaluable.

Technical know-how can be one of the largest impediments to different online communities. One of the biggest concerns with software has become the GUI[8]. One of the technologies that took off with the advent of 3-D accelerated graphics cards was the web-based walk (sometimes fly) around real-time 3-D community. They usually required a special plug-in that would often work correctly; often not. They were clunky-looking and the communities that evolved were rather un-inspiring. These real-time 3-D community structures actually migrated to and were adopted by the online gaming community.

Driven by users’ discontent with the predictability of computer-controlled sprites’[9] AI, Massively MultiPlayer Online Games (MMPOGs) are quickly becoming the standard. Originally reserved for PC-based software, major game manufacturers have incorporated network abilities into the new console machines. MMPOGs evolved into entire universes where instead of fighting with/against a couple of people, the majority of interaction was with online teammates and the computer-projected networked 3-D identity of your flesh-and-blood counterparts.

The point of the above is this: if the technical complexity to participate in the community is daunting then you have limited your userbase to those who are technically skilled. Sometimes ‘daunting’ could be as little as the software requiring a restart of the operating system. As technology progresses, networking is mainstreamed, and the GUIs refined we will see more and more participation and demand for online communities.

Registration
My experience was challenging. I was unable to select a name that had not already been taken (or so I thought). The sections below document my woes.

Image Issues
Text Box: ?Sample of ‘warped’ text in authentication box?

Most sites now use some form of image-based authentication. The applicant user must re-type the code presented in the picture. The system was designed to prevent spammers from automatically creating new accounts on popular newsgroups and filling the most popular threads with advertisements for whatever wares they were peddling. Clever spammers adapted by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to parse the image and glean the passcode thusly. In response developers began to add various techniques that render OCR processing on the images nearly impossible such as warping, adding noise, using various font sizes, placing grids through the text, and altering colors. This has (temporarily) resulted in new accounts being created only by human-beings and the forums being on the whole spam-free.

When I tried signing up for my account, the registration page did not say that the code was case-sensitive, and it took several failed attempts before I figured that expectation out.

Name Issues
When registering I pride myself on being exceptionally good at getting some of my favorite names without any problem. If the username I usually like is taken, I simply add some words that I think are appropriately obscure together to form a new username that is sure to be available. One of my techniques is to use references to the classic text-adventure ZORK such as ‘grue’, ‘frobozz’, or ‘flathead’ referring to a monster, a magic company, and the King of the Underworld. They never fail.

After trying in vain to choose my favorites:
hoopy_frood
hoopy_frood_42
moleculeblackout

I resorted to the Zork references, they never fail:
frobozz_magic
grue_repellent
choose_frobozz
zorkis_maximus

I frantically chose wildly unrelated words:
atomic_wedgie
platapus_5xy
12_53_84_47_42

The last was a test. Assuming a random distribution of digits I estimated that the probability of _that_ name being registered at:

To contrast what a remarkably unlikely thing it is to pick a sting at random like that and have somebody else have already taken it, I contrast it with your chances of winning the PowerBall jackpot buying only one ticket:

So too is it similar to throwing a coin in the air 75 times and having it land heads up each time.

I send an e-mail to the administrators later that week (April 12^th ) stating that I was having difficulty creating an account but never received a response. This is not a huge surprise, but it was annoying nonetheless.

Spam Filter Issues
Even after you have signed up you must access an e-mail message that is sent to your primary mail account as is defined in your user profile. This message contains a code that you must go back to the BoredOfStudies site with and place into your profile. This allows the BoredOfStudies system to verify that you have a valid e-mail address in your user profile. My Hotmail account needed to be set to “allow all messages no matter how nasty or inappropriate through.” In the time that it took me to set the filter, go to the site, request a new code to be sent, get back to my Hotmail account, get the code and set the filter back to high, I had already received several solicitations of a pornographic nature in addition to the e-mail message containing the code. A testament to the upside/downside nature of spam filters I expect.

Finally Succeeded
I was finally able to register as “ubergeekery667” a couple of days later; they had fixed the registration system.

Lurking about
While looking for someone to help, or someone to help me, I found an individual who was in need of assistance doing dihybrid crosses. Two replies to the plea of ‘uknowuwantme’ were unhelpful, and though late (uknowuwantme had needed the answer 2 weeks earlier than I replied) I figured I’d close off the thread with the answer for future help-seekers. The transcript follows:

Conclusion
I think that lists are best suited to tasks such as this community is undertaking, wherein users post a thread that is a question and others chip-in with the answer. I saw a lot of partial answers, but there were also a lot of detailed and complete answers there a well.

With all sites of this nature, there is a sort of “majority rules” and “who sounds more knowledgeable” when dealing with conflicting information or information that goes against common knowledge/experience.

Impact on me professionally
I think that while instructing it could be very helpful to build your own wiki as you go, with advice and detailed instructions of how to do things like Punnett Squares etc. As you cover a topic, you could outline what it is you want students to know then post it in the appropriate area of the Wiki. It could serve as an online tutoring area.

Impact on me Personally
I think there was ultimately little personal impact. I knew that lists existed and am no stranger to them. Though I use them they way I think they should be used, when I need help, I post. When I see a post I know a lot about, I help out. But I do not, under any circumstances, live my life around the list.

Impact on Students
I think that communities such as BoredOfStudies probably go a long way to helping to create an excellent help environment. I would like to see more of them and the software become easier. Right now, to run your own wiki or bbs, you need a server with PHP and MYSQL installed. If you have those things, are comfortable with working on a server, and know where to find useful PHP ‘scripts” you are set. You rarely need to know how to actually script or code to make it all go. They come with integrated installers.

Perhaps BB services will become like blogging now; ubiquitous and free. Right now however, it’s not the case. With memory continuing on its downward price spiral and hard drive space becoming super cheap (internal flash hard drives are beginning to hit the mainstream) you will find the walls to the average user or would be administrator come crashing down.

[1] From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_studies , the creators’ mission statement into Wikipedia

[2] From http://www.boredofstudies.org/mission_statement.php

[3] off-topic

A post in the incorrect thread

[4] Thread
A topic being discussed in a discussion group

[5] Post

Verb – to write a message to a list

“I posted to the group last night”

Noun – a single message that has been written to the group

“hey, did you read my post from last night?”

[6] List

An online system for allowing individuals (users) to create identities then start new threads and post messages. Other registered users are then allowed to post responses, usually in the form of advice or answers to the original post.

[7] An avatar is a small to medium size image that appears in conjunction with a user’s username. They are commonly an actual image of the person, something they like, or something that relates to their username, but it could be anything at all.

[8] A GUI is the Graphical User Interface, or what the user actually interacts with. These often take the form of a push-button, checkbox, and drop-down menu driven format.

[9] In computer gaming, a sprite is a computer controlled player or object.