Comments on: MobWrite: The Web-based Open-source Multi-user Real-time Plain-text Editor

By: kbdamm

kbdamm — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:00:00 +0000

I think that this work is useful in many contexts (though not in the form of MobWrite). It would be nice to take turns adding to a document with colleagues or coworkers jumping in to add stuff or edit what I’m saying. And, if he finishes his work on the programmer’s IDE with multi-write then it could prove to be very useful to pair programming teams or setting up a quick pair programming session between a code maintaner and a new intern at a company, especially if they’re not in the same office buidling.

Now, emacs has had this functionality for *many* years, but you have to xhost and coordinate with that person through a separate channel, and that could take some time. I’ve done it rarely just because it takes such effort to set it up.

But, looking at the MobWrite demo, it’s obvious that if you make it *too* easy to set up, then there will be a lot of malicious users ruining the act of content creation, often resulting in chaos. But, it looks rather easy to set it up on an intranet somewhere, especially if a server is dedicated to it. Were I in industry instead of academia, I would suggest it to my sysadmin.

By: english nazi

english nazi — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 16:46:49 +0000

It looks like Karl needs an editor to proof his text. I bet if multiple people were submitting his message, those errors wouldn’t slip through (I count at least 7).

By: Karl Moz

Karl Moz — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 17:38:27 +0000

useless. why? there are no controls over input. the issues you will see are the same that you see in social networks. who is the alpha-male? who’s input gets presedence?

By: Neil Fraser

Neil Fraser — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 15:47:05 +0000

Some joker pasted the entire Book of Genesis into it, which caused the load average to rise to unacceptable levels, which caused our sysadmin to kill it.

I’ve deleted the biblical spam and put MobWrite back up. It’s quite well-behaved if unless one abuses it.

By: nxt

nxt — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:19:18 +0000

Looks very interesting – too bad it has been put down. Don’t You just love the message: “This page has actually generated interest among web users, so we had to put it down.” Though I can image the a lot of people using the DIFF in real-time can put so much load on the server, that it probably would no longer know whether it’s running Windows or Unix. An interesting idea might be to use the computing power of the client for this task – though I suppose there would be tons of security issues DIFFing the text on the side of the browser.

By: Charles

Charles — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:49:45 +0000

The differential sync looks a lot like RSS SSE. Neil, if you’re there, perhaps you could talk a bit more about how they might differ.