Sylbi

Sylbi is an innovative conversation system that is built using Perl and MySQL. It is not a traditional forum, nor is it a blogging platform. In fact, Sylbi falls in both categories. The idea behind Sylbi is that a blog with comments and a forum only differ in their perspectives of the conversation. Both mediums allow users to initiate or participate in conversations through a chronological set of posts.

The key difference between the two mediums is the way they present conversations. A blog presents the perspective of the owner(s) of the blog, while a forum presents the perspective of the forum and a topic defined in the forum. However, both mediums serve the same purpose of facilitating conversations.

Sylbi works by defining topic buckets that indicate the site’s focus, either broad or narrow. Conversations end up in topic buckets with users signing up and beginning to post and reply. Unlike most forums, Sylbi does not require users to select a category to start conversations. They just begin posting as if they were blogging.

Site moderators manually train the site to predict which conversations belong to which topic bucket. Over time, Sylbi becomes able to move conversations to the appropriate bucket without moderators’ help.

Additionally, Sylbi offers two views of conversations: Forum view and Blog view. In Forum view, a user can select a topic bucket to find conversations while in Blog view, they can browse conversations started by a specific user. Users can customize their personal “blog” site by modifying templates to retain individuality while still actively participating in the community. Conversations exist both in the “blog” and in the topic buckets of the site (“forum”).

Sylbi’s latest release adds an edit functionality. Users can now edit their posts, providing even more flexibility in participating in conversations.