Beff, No-one is going to own anyone elses board, lol, I understand your fears, but we are talking about a straight forward portal or website, that effectively lists or showcases each community.
Now, this does not mean (as a requirement for wanting to join I would say) that any other board is responsible for another.
It will be down to each community to safeguard their 'intellectual property' / etc, as it is now.
Nothing will change in that regard.
As for whoever 'owns' the site / portal, well I would say everyone does! Or if it turns out that it is necessary to appoint either one person or a 'set of staff' to run and oversee it all, then I would suggest do it the ol' fashioned way and vote on it.
Just to be clear we are NOT looking to amalgamate every community involved into one giant big one, thats never going to work, but just create a single resource for all SW RPing boards.
Right now every community is spread out all over the place, having a kind of network will benefit each board, but only if its done right.
Bottom line is every community will still be responsible for its own board, nothing will change that.
A person logs onto the portal and sees a definitive list of the involved forums. They can then click on that list to check out a small interview with a single chosen admin and player of each forum.
From there, it gives the instructions of how to apply and a link to both the forum itself and the specific board for which you post your player application too.
We create this and then yahoo/google/ask list it linked to Star Wars. Also advertise it regularly on www.theforce.net and other SW Fan Sites in order to get a regular stream of visitors.
From there we can work towards better cooperation by having cross board competitions etc etc
I see no issue of intellectual rights trampling. The only one would be over control. I'd throw down and set up the site myself but I am now unemployed. With a very simple authentication and DB backend, the Admins of the site could have near-total control over how their site is presented.
If TRF or Fans or Epics decided to host it I would be fine with that, too.
I was, at first, not understanding what Beff was getting at but as I think more on it I see he does have a point in that there does become a legal issue. If I understand him correctly, while we cannot prevent thieves from doing their thing if they are intent on stelaing, we do not want to give legal license for them to do it.
What do I mean?
Let's say we get a domain and pay for a neutral site for our group board portal. Unless members get together to form a company to pay for this site, the business that sells the domain is going to assume the "person" (Let's call him Bob. (no offense to any Bob's out there).) who makes the actual purchase is considered the "owner" of that site.
So the domain company assumes Bob is the owner since Bob made the purchase and so forwards the passwords and legal authority to do what he wants with his newfound space.
If we do not set something up as to what Bob's actual responsibilities are and what the relationship is between all the boards on this portal, we could be leaving ourselves open to some nasty legal issues should Bob become a vindictive bastard for whatever slight happens.
Seeing the hurt feelings across the boards on some issues, it's not a hard thing to imagine someone or some group eventually pissing off Bob.
The question becomes, what is Bob's character?
While not picking on TGC, I will use them as an example. TGC makes a clear distinction between owner and administration. The admins may have access to certain areas and can make modifications to the board but ultimate authority rests in the owner. I do not presume to know how ownership of the content on TGC is distributed but the question does remain: Unless something is determined beforehand, I would think that legally all content (not copywritten) belongs to the owner and theirs to modify, delete and use as they see fit.
Now one may say, but there's not going to be roleplays or much information on the 'Unity' board for Bob (should he become vindictive) to actually threaten.
But what if Bob names the Unity Portal site, "Roleplaying Legacies"? What if Roleplaying Legacies is registered as a legal entity?
Remember, if you are a community that hosts other "groups" from other sites, these groups must conform to the main community's rules and regs.
So TRF, TGC, Epics, GOTOR.. whatever, if they associate themselves with Roleplaying Legacies, then do they fall under whatever rules, bylaws, regs Bob sets for Roleplaying Legacies then? If nothing is written and no standards in place, Bob may very well claim ownership of material on boards associating with what is legally his.
We are not talking about function now. What the portal is designed to do and how it will work. We are talking legality.
We need to set something up that defines what Bob's legal powers entail, as owner and what is expressly understood between Bob and all boards choosing to associate themselves on the board and vice versa.
Beff is not saying somthing bad will happen. Maybe nothing will come of it. But it makes good sense to cover your ass as best you can so you don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
Remember now, suppose we do this and someone else pays the next year. So now there is another owner, Stan! What kind of person is Stan as compared to Bob?
Having this all in place leaves nothing to chance no matter how things change.
I mean, it's better than having Sam and Grevious (Han) hunt you down all over the web..
To get rid of your ownership hypothetical problem, it could be paid for by multiple people - everyone pays $5 for the hosting. Granted, that still doesn't take care of the problem of the owner of the portal going mad and trying to impose rules on the linked boards.
However, there could be a disclaimer written into the bottom, or the top, of the page, stating that the boards linked to are affiliated by a common love of Star Wars and by no means are obligated to follow one single set of rules. All boards have separate rules and we encourage you to read the FAQs of the individual message boards.
But what it all comes down to is simply a page of links, yes?
No offense, but unless Bob can prove he owns/controls the content on the other boards, he doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. We're only talking about a portal site here. He can attempt to do whatever he wants, but in the end, it will be obvious who did what if only by virtue of timestamps and transaction logs. The only valid fear is someone decides to be a cretin and either steals content (easy to prove). Bob's legal powers amount to authorization by the original board to host extremely limted content provided by and with permission by the other boards.
You make it sound as if Bob could theoretically obtain your content. I have no idea how that could even legally be a remote possibility with the statements at the bottom of every decently run board.
I'll be very clear: Bob can only host exactly what you allow him to. Anything more is fearful hogwash. The worst thing Bob can do is illegally mirror your content and claim it as his own, which wouldn't stand up anywhere.
