The Vanity of an Ancient King

The feature-set has been frozen. (no, I am not telling you what it is. If we drop things, you'll only feel disappointed).

The next step is to divide the giant feature-set of the application into deliverable parts. "Release early. Release often."

We also have to figure out how the modules will behave (look/feel/act). This will take awhile.

Also, I am calling people who have Ruby/Rails experience. While we haven't settled on a platform (that comes *after* deciding how the modules will behave), I am looking directly at RoR, as I like the strict MVC and rapid development structure.

I just wanted to say thank you to those who showed support and are willing to volunteer on the Ursus Maximus project. I've contacted some of you via email, and I still need to contact a few more people.

If I haven't contacted you, that doesn't mean I don't want your services. It does mean that I'm just not ready for you *yet*. The project is just beginning, and we're still in the earliest of early planning stages.

This is going to be an interesting project as there won't be any secrets. I'll post all relevant news here, so you can follow along at home. If you have any questions, ask. I may not be able to answer all of them, but I'll give it a go.

Thanks again!

OK, so I purchased the domain. From the thread Building a Better Bear411, I got a lot of positive feedback. I am gonna do this.

There are a lot of features that will go into the site. Some will make the initial cut, some will be added to the list of potential future upgrades. At this time, I'd like to outline the basic themes:

• This will be a bear site, foremost. This means everyone is invited if you feel "bear identified" in any way, or are an admirer of the same.
• The primary purpose will be to foster community, not just hook-ups
• There will be free and paid accounts
• While I can't commit to this, I will try to make sure the free members never get their services cut. However, Paid/donating members will get perks
• The User Experience will blow the doors off any existing site to date.
• Don't expect much at first, but *do* expect new features to be implemented rapidly.

Now it's your turn. There are a lot of you out there who have talent. I'm not able to create this by my self, so I am asking for volunteers. I would like to have people dedicated to creating a quality site, who share in this Vision Thing. I need coders, artists, database admins, and writers. I'll be handling the Information Architecture, and standards. Soon, I will also need a handful of beta testers. It's going to be a hell of a lot of work, but it will be worth the effort if we can foster a community. Chosen volunteers will be rewarded in some way, *at least* with a free (full) account.

All past and future posts on this topic will be tagged as "ursusmaximus", so you can easily follow along.

What say ye?

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So I started postulating in a post on greatbearmd's LJ about what it would take to make a better bear411-like site.
( giant post behind this cut )