PhpMyDesktop arcade

PhpMyDesktop|arcade fills a space between a Bulletin Board and a Chat Room with an additional focus on gaming. To find out why we even need something between them, we should have a look at the good and bad aspects of Bulletin Boards and Chat Rooms respectively.

A Bulletin Board is very good for topic oriented discussions and it gives you a lot of freedom for when to post a reply, mostly there is no need to watch the discussion all of the time, you can log-out for some hours and later come back to further discuss the topic.

The bad part of a Bulletin Board is that if you want to speak directly to someone inside of a topic, the endless quoting can get really annoying and it does happens quite often that the thread goes off topic.

A Chat Room (or IM) on the other hand is very good for person to person discussions, but you have to be there for the whole discussion, you just can't leave easily for some hours and later come back to further discuss on the same topic.

Did nobody do something between those two extremes? Yes, there's something between them, it's called a Tag Board or ShoutBox, but it never really was a good solution, not because the Tag Boards where badly realised, the problem was more of a conceptual nature, because basically a Tag Board is just a slow chat or a cheap Bulletin Board to be honest.

PhpMyDesktop|arcade is different; it works more like a logged real-life discussion. First it introduces a 2D field for the discussions, it's not like with Chat Rooms, Bulletin Boards or Tag Boards where the discussion is always from top to bottom or bottom to top, the discussion is two dimensional, left and right, top and bottom becomes a real meaning.

This way it's possible to make a real branching inside of a discussion to take a different path without going off topic in the main discussion and it gives you a much better idea how the discussion flows.