After some review, I realized that I perceived this idea differently than it was actually written. It's still not the same as how I think it should work.
Personal Opinion: This is too different from how usergroups work. Certain aspects, such as listing all things a user has listed in their homenode, would take a lot of work from a database standpoint, as I understand it, because it would require querying all known sets of data to find out if a user has listed anything. If the user wants people to know about these things from their homenode, they'll put them there -- that's how it used to be with the "foo everythingians" nodes.
I'm so full of arrogant pride that I'm right (spawned by the fact I just woke up) that I'll even create a fake conversation to detail what I think is wrong with insanefuzzie's idea (which is a lot closer to what I want than one might think) and detail how I think things should be done.
What was the purpose of the foo everythingians nodes, as sleeping wolf perceives it?
To provide an index for users based on qualities they had, and to allow looking for commonalities.
Okay, but insanefuzzie's idea does that.
I don't think so. Let's take a theoretical example that never existed: Pagan Everythingians. As a node, it would be reasonably safe to say it might contain: (apologies to those whose names I use if I get anything wrong)
Now, how would one go and use a search field to find
Pagans in general if each of us popped exactly that in there?
It's real simple. You tell users to semi-nodespace themselves, so that you would be Pagan: Animal Totemist.
You really can't trust users to do such things properly. If you don't believe me, go to eBay and do a search for Plam. Look at all the Plam Pilots! Most users will fill out the field once and never check if they even spelled it right.
Okay, then we restrict everything in advance.
Not only would this require more code, but who comes up with the categories? One of the neatest things I've learned about Library Science is that it admits the futility of outright categorization. Above, sexuality is suggested as being restricted to 'straight' / 'gay' / 'lesbian' / 'bi' /'undecided'. Aside from the fact that this attempts to pigeonhole bisexuals (we're not all 50/50; there's your Kinsey 2s and 4s, your cyclics, those who have sapiosexuality), as well as the other groups (is being a 'vanilla' gay male the same as being a bear?), this also doesn't fulfill the "out" everythingians node — it tells us who is comfortable with the self-awareness they have.
If you're so smart, how would you do it?
As a basis:
- take usergroups — a list of users with something in common.
- Add a field, 255 characters of text for each user, linkable as per the homenode fields at the top of homenodes, to specify what about them makes them part of this group. This way in addition to listing characteristics it can list things like 'gay age' and such.
- Allow users to add and remove themselves from the group via the group page, in addition to the group creator being able to add/remove/edit users.
- Drop the /msg alias; if the group creator can add, it could turn into SPAM/flamewar/whatnot very, very quickly.
- Retain the space at the top to put some text, but restrict it to links and such, since I think it currently supports superdoc functionality.
- Creation of these 'user tag groups' would be a Level 5 power (because in mind it complements room creation rather well), allowing users to self-categorize.
- Obviously, no experience would be granted for their creation.
- Don't bother working at making it homenode-accessible; the whole idea, IMNSHO, is to go and provide indexes to users, not vice-versa.
- Oh, and sort the list of users by username for fast lookup. No one wants to look at users sorted by date of addition to the list or order that they joined E2.
Is my idea perfect? No. It doesn't work for birthdays (though it does work very well for addresses). It doesn't autoprovide links from homenodes, though I feel the structured part of homenodes is already overdone as-is -- imagine the homenode load time if it had to sift through all 'userlists' or 'usertags' (as I call them to myself) to find out what users had what to say about themselves.