On the other hand, the trolls and crapflooders (all two or three of them) sapped me of most of my motivation to participate.  The older I get the less willing I am to waste energy on dealing with foolishness.

Now about your criticisms.  

Framing the problem with groklaw as "undemocratic" and "intolerant" is rather simplistic.  I am not just someone who uses Free/Open Source, I also strongly believe in the social aspect.  It is good to share, to give back, to be of service to others.  F/OSS coders, advocates, and users tend to be very generous.  They also practice what they preach.  At the surface groklaw appears to advocate what the F/OSS community stands for, but what they actually practice is far from resembling any F/OSS project or site that I have ever participated in.  Groklaw is very tightly focused on legal issues surrounding a specific lawsuit.  The site is far from being "open" in any way, as a matter of fact the terms of usage are far more restrictive than the microsoft web site.

My main concern was that something calling itself advocated F/OSS and "applying open source principles to the law" was in reality a closed off, proprietary, hostile environment to any straying from the party line.  There is no inclusiveness at groklaw, there is no way to fork it, there is no way to carry it on if PJ either decides to call it quits or gets attacked legally.

IPW from the very start decided that every article, diary, and comment was going to be posted under the creative commons commercial share-alike with attribution license.  As far as I can tell IPW is one of the first open source related discussion sites that licenses all of the content under something actually resembling a comparable F/OSS license.  To me, this is a significant success.  If I am to contribute to the defense of F/OSS in some small way, I want my contribution to be made to the community, not a proprietary web site.  Five years from now, almost all of the yahoo posts will be gone, and who knows if groklaw will still be around.

Anyway, being "democratic" has nothing to do with it.  It is more about practicing what you preach.  Being open to criticism, being inclusive to the community, listening politely to the concerns of others, allowing mirrors, being honest with moderation, etc...

I think IPW suffers mostly from a lack of organization and coherence, which happens to be a strong point of groklaw.  Scoop does moderation well, but it sucks for organizing a site into topical sections and resource archives.  Everything is kind of spread out and there is no way to determine which stories or diaries are really worth reading.  There are some gems here, but they are hard as hell to find.  I would like to see some sort of rating system for the actual articles and diaries.

In closing, I don't believe IPW has "failed" at all.  It is more likely that we are just going through a slow period, it being summer and a slow news cycle...

[PJ] can post articles [on GL] as soon as they're ready, and she is always available to write them. IP-Wars.net's democratic article promotion is slow. Democracy is inefficient.

There's not a lot most of us can do to make ourselves more available to write articles.  I disagree that democracy is essentially inefficient.  I agree that the current IPW infrastructure makes it inefficient.  We can also post articles as soon as they're ready - as diary entries.  What's missing is any way to promote them if they are judged to be particularly worthwhile.

People go to Groklaw for breaking news. If you want to compete with Groklaw you need to break news, and a "breaking news" message board thread is not the way to do it.

I agree that "breaking news" is a crock.  GL's solution - an off-topic thread under every article - isn't any better, however on GL important news is usually followed by a substantive article, thank's to PJ's insight and industry, which we can't duplicate here.

I'm not sure what, structurally, to do about "breaking news" other than that it clearly needs its own section.  What are logbooks for?

Attention holding. PJ's articles are usually more interesting than those on IP-Wars.net. She has a knack for journalism and an ability to explain to us non-lawyers without putting us to sleep.

That is a matter of opinion.  I agree that she's at her best explaining subtle points of law to non-lawyer types, but all too often she goes off into a rant, and frequently I can't be bothered to read to the end.  In the original version of this article the email spoke for itself, and her commentry was almost entirely superfluous.  (It's been updated several times and is now considerably more interesting.)

This article is also a good example of critically important new information which hasn't got a mention here.

Note that I didn't mention the message boards as a reason I go to Groklaw. I think very few people go to Groklaw for the comments. They may glance over them while they're there, but it's not the draw of Groklaw. You aren't going to get the audience Groklaw has simply by making the comments section democratic and tolerant. The reason that people go to Groklaw is the articles and the articles alone.

I agree that people don't generally go there to read the comments - they're mostly drivel - but a lot of people go there to make comments.  PJ says that it's a working site, not a discussion site, but she doesn't suppress discussion per se (so long as people are saying the right things).  Lamlaw has more insightful analysis than GL, IMO, but isn't nearly as well-read, if general tech-media citations are anything to go by.  Similarly tuxrocks and scofacts have better resources.  But these sites do not allow comments.  YSCOX on the other hand, has only comments, yet is very popular.

Discounting the trolls on both sites, I find the discussion here much more engaging than GL, perhaps because we have a smaller, more committed core membership.

Remove the need to publish articles. Link to other articles instead. That is, change the site to be a central portal with comments (ala Slashdot) rather than published-article centric (ala Kuro5hin). This will allow readers to submit articles from elsewhere. You'll need to change the software you use to run this site from Scoop to something like Slashcode. You may want to keep the ability to publish full articles, so perhaps keep the current Scoop-based site, but have it as a link off the front Slashcode portal site. When a new article is published you can put a Slashdot-like link on the front page just like it was a link to an article on any another website.

I strongly disagree with this.  While "breaking news" is a valued section of the site (by me at least, and apparently by the others), it doesn't generate a lot of discussion.  Apparently the extra effort to click on a link, read an off-site article, then return to comment on it isn't something people want to do unless they are very interested, incensed, etc.  In that case, the 'comment' is likely to be lengthy and could easily (and usually does) form the basis of an article or diary entry.

The articles submitted to the Slashcode portal front page need to be approved for publishing by one or more benevolent dictators (Jeff & probably a few others). That is, remove the democracy from publishing the submitted stories for the front-page. In terms of publishing, urgency is more important than keeping the majority happy. Keep the tolerance for the comment section.

It's still not "wrong".  It's considerably less active than I had hoped it would be.  IMO there are three reasons for that: 1) there has been very little SCOX news over the last 9/10 months and the interested base audience has been evaporating.  2) the trolls here convinced some of the audience as we were starting out that there wouldn't be enough of a signal to be worthwhile.  And 3) I considerably underestimated the amount of real work that goes into producing a presentable article.   Not that we'd be likely an article which was so, so in grammar and organization if it had interesting ideas, but everyone wants to put their best foot forward in an article, so it just doesn't happen much.

I don't know if others are in the same situation but the amount of real work I have to attend to began to pick up pretty heavily about three months ago... it's getting worse (which of course, is better for me, personally).

I don't see much wrong with the structure of IPW at this point.   What we ought do is get in the habit of using the articles for short IP related items other than diaries.   Yes it's a little more work to clean up, but not a big deal especially if you use the community editorial input.

Other than that IPW has not failed as long as some still use it.  I'd say leave it here, remind people it's available if they want to use it, possibly scattering that message a little wider than we have previously,  and see if it picks up.

1. Promotion from diaries. The formal article submission process has problems. It introduces delays and by the time the article is published, all the members have already seen it. One solution is to have a way to promote diary entries. If a diary entry is good, then it would be promoted to an article. This would be done by copying, and the original would stay in the diary with its comments. The author would have the option of revising the article in the process, which woud make the old comments, in effect, editorial.

2. More feedback for authors. Right now all there is is comments. There needs to be a ratings system. I've noticed on Yahoo that certain types of messages can get double digit ratings without a single reply, while low rated messages can produce blizzards, so number of comments isn't the only useful metric for articles.

3. More resources. Most of the time when I go to Groklaw it's for reference material - documents, quotes old messages, etc. The more reasons you give users for visiting, the more visitors and thus articles and comments you'll have.

4. Promotion to resources. Occasionally diary entries are made to make information available and aren't intended to be amusing or even interesting. I posted some lists of software patents that Microsoft holds. I don't expect many people read them all the way through. It's likely, however that some visitors to this site may want to know what patents Microsoft has in some area. I know of no other easily used resource. The others with this information are interactive and are very tedious to use for large numbers of patents.

The simple answer is that the trolls won.

The last straw for me was when the trolls started writing literally 100s of offtopic posts per day, often laden with insults and accusations that the IPW regulars were into necrophilia and scatology.

Even worse, other trolls were gaming the moderation system and rating those insults up and rating ontopic material down. One of those trolls stated upfront that his only purpose was to downrate the "regulars" and uprate other trolls.

On top of all this, the trolls were demanding to be banned for their offensive behaviour. No doubt that was their intention all along; to get their accounts banned so they could crow on Yahoo that IPW deletes accounts.

Was IP-Wars ever supposed to replace GL? That wasn't my impression.

I thought its goal was to have a forum that allowed free discussion of IP issues. Something that is not available at Groklaw.

Freshmeat.net and download.com have some similar features, you use them to look for software. But they are also totally different philosophies. You can't make a direct comparison.

The same goes for Groklaw and IP-Wars.

If it only serves as a useful site for the couple dozen people that are involved, it is still a success.

One time, I was told by a user at one of my sites (backpackgeartest.org) that we had no reason to be proud of our traffic levels at that time (2000 unique users/day) because his software blog got more than that, and it doesn't even begin to compare to Google's traffic. But that is simplay a bad comparison. Backpacker Magazine's circulation doesn't compare to Time magazine either, that doesn't mean that it isn't a success.

First some history. IP-Wars was started because Groklaw's message boards were seen as undemocratic and intolerant.

I can't speak to Jeff's reasons for starting IPW. Further, you may very well have characterized the motivations of others in migrating here. Nevertheless, I differ from your stereotype.

I have made very few public or private statements about my choice to post at IPW. But it's a convenient place to post my research into the SCO v world+dog fight and “intellectual property” issues generally, in the small hope that my links and information might prove helpful to others.