This one is for those of you that used The Vine which was available for a short time last summer.

How many people liked The Vine?

There were two major issues with the version we had up:

1. People thought it was online chat, so should appear more like a regular chat room. The largest complaint was that you couldn't see many messages. The assumption that it was an online chat was wrong. The Vine should have been thought much more of as a forum than an online chat. The Vine did display more content than the forum did on a single page. It was AoPS' fault for not making this more clear, although I don't really know how we could have done so.

2. The multi-user library has a major bug in it which causes problems when a user gets disconnected for whatever reason and reconnects. For some people, this happened a lot, and caused considerable problems for the overall running of the system, and is the biggest reason we took it down. Again, this was a bug in the multi-user library, not software produced by AoPS. Sadly, this bug still exists. I was the first to report it to the developers of the multi-user library, but many others have since reported it hoping that it gets fixed.

On the other hand, I would like to see The Vine, or something like it, come back. I think it has the potential to allow our site members to better able socialize and learn from each other, which would be a big win for both our current users and any future users. The possibility of using it for gifted education in general, not just math, as well as for some other demographics, has appeal to me.

Sadly, I know I don't have any available time to re-develop The Vine, and the bug in the multi-user library still exists, so for the moment this is a no-go. However, I would love to get feedback about your desires to see something like The Vine back. I would also love to hear some of your suggestions for improvement. My personal first want for improvement is the ability for users to create their own categories/forums. You want a Forum for your math club? You want a Forum for your favorite game, Dominion/Magic/Pokemon/whatever? You want a forum for Tennis? You want a forum to discuss Piano or Violin? Start one! Wouldn't that be kind of cool?