Raymond said:
To be honest, I wouldn't join a website that states "we are just running this for fun"
You only join if you want. In fact there are many sites out there running for the "fun" of running them without getting profit, and they're living strong. Yes you might think n.irc.su is a site that's offline half of the days of a week, but in fact we're already up by more than two months with NO downtime (100% uptime), and we have never shut down the site, without giving our users a reason (for example, when we upgraded the system, the site had problems for about five minutes during the upgrade, and we explained to our users we had to stop the site for a little bit).
The Hat Tipper said:
I noticed you were running elgg... kinda risky. Or at least I think. The problem with using a script is the inability to expand and develop. Ofcourse it is open source, but it sucks because that is all the developers code you have to figure out and work with.
Honestly, Social Media is a huge internet industry. Your network must be one step ahead in order to succeed. I do not see that.
Elgg is very secure, more secure than many custom small social network scripts where you can break in in about five minutes if you have some techincal knowledges. And, I don't see where you can't expand any open source script, provided that you know how to code (perhaps that's the problem, you don't know how to code), you can develop it further. And in the specific case of Elgg, it even supports plugins that you can download for free from the Elgg community, or buy from other sites, without the need to code. And usually these plugins are also GPL licensed, so you can expand them too.
I think I can affirm that Elgg is more easily customizable and secure than other scripts like jCow.
And no, the source code of Elgg is not difficult to understand. It might not be well commented on the code itself, but there are many documents online explaining how the system works, and if you have any questions you can also ask in the community.
And the step ahead of n.irc.su, apart from not "stealing" user data and activities and selling it to big companies, and the fact of having NO advertisements of any kind, is a step ahead that's still to come. We're thinking on big improvements, a new (custom) design and new features. BUT we need user feedback to understand what exactly needs to be done, and that's what we don't have now.
We're also thinking on having a platform to let developers write their own apps like on the Facebook platform, but this is not going to come soon because of two main things: first, AFAIK no one has done this before on Elgg, so the code must be written from scratch, which takes time (which we don't have right now) and work, and second, having an application/gaming platform would require an developer license agreement (DLA) which makes sure the apps are open-source compliant with n.irc.su, and that they agree to our privacy policy (not "steal" user data) and don't have ads, and I don't know how many developers out there are willing to develop to Elgg platform for free, releasing the source code of their apps/games - but I don't think there are many.
Anyways, having a full featured social network with support for custom application makes no sense while we don't have many users. If many users sign up, it might get interesting to have an application platform. But for now, not. And there are more important things to solve first, like the email being delivered to SPAM folders and such.
BTW, @The Hat Tipper, did you sign up? Or just went to the features page (which BTW is just a enormous page with the list of the features along with some static screenshots) to build your opinion?
