
Prototype: discussion groups only accessible with certain email domains - andymmm
Hi,<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking about an idea for a while, and would like to know how other people think of it.<p>The idea is to automatically create a forum for each email domain, so that people within the email domain can have open discussions in the forum, but people outside the email domain can&#x27;t access the forum.<p>Some scenarios where it may be useful:
(1) a university of students with the @someUniversity.edu email can access an exclusive forum that automatically created for them (and they &quot;just know&quot; that it&#x27;s their);
(2) a company of 20 people use their @someCompany.com email to get an online discussion place for free.<p>The deeper idea behind this service, is that a person may be more open to other people with a similar background, and email domain seems to be a good indicator of &quot;similar background&quot;. For example, there&#x27;re a lot of topics a student may be open to discuss online, if he&#x2F;she knows that the discussion is only visible to people with the same .edu email.<p>I spent some time to implement the idea, and a prototype was just released at www.commonbuzz.com<p>It&#x27;s an over-the-weekend hack of Flarum(www.flarum.org), but at least show the essence of the idea. Feel free to check it out.<p>Cheers,
- Andy
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greenyoda
In a corporate environment, people are already likely to have discussion
channels for company business, such as Slack channels and e-mail lists. And if
employees want to discuss politically sensitive issues among themselves, the
last thing they'd want is for their private discussions to be traceable to
their corporate e-mail accounts. Not to mention that their management and HR
would have e-mail addresses in the same domain, which would really restrict
open conversation.

Same for universities, where undergrads, grad students, faculty, adjunct
faculty, administrators, support staff and alumni can all have addresses in
the same domain. These groups have little in common, and don't really want to
share their private thoughts with each other.

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dragonwriter
The problem I see with this is that the need seems largely filled where it is
real: where a common email domain represents a real community, it's often
already a group that has closed discussion fora. Where it's not (most ISPs and
webmail prroviders), even if they don't have private fora, it's unlikely that
there is much demabdmmnd for a way to communicate exclusively with people with
the same email domain.

