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Nodes vs Forum Topics
A major design issue with the Grid

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The Grid has two main ways people interact with it: nodes, and forum posts.

Almost all of the content surrounding the Grid is angled around interfacing with nodes. Nodes have ICE to crack and set, ACL lists to manage, backups to restore them when vandalized. Eventually (hopefully) they'll be monitored by daemons as well.

Enter the humble forum topic.

Forum topics can't be messed with AT ALL outside of people posting nasty comments with them, or Gridworks/forum mods deleting them. If you're an aspiring journalist publishing manifestos or whatever, you do them in a forum post and an ENTIRE ARCHETYPE dedicated around information control is locked out of being able to meaningfully interact with you. Deckers seriously can't do anything about them unless they're in 1 very specific position.

The closest thing I can equate it to is being able to opt out of solos being able to kill you with weapons and instead having to insult you to make you stop talking.

This is kind of a fundamentally huge design issue with the Grid and I'm not wholly sure how to fix it without just straight up preventing people from posting topics. Maybe topics do need to go and be replaced with a new node type that allows people to easily comment on them, somehow?

By Ameliorative at Jun 11, 2026, 10:26 PM | 1
Yeah, this has been an issue since Grid 2 and is part of why everyone just does everything on the forums rather than bothering to make a node for it.
By Baguette at Jun 12, 2026, 4:22 AM | 0
There is no way to balance this in a way that will please everyone. How much would you use the BGBB if every time you posted there was a decent chance someone who didn't like what you were saying simply made your post disappear or edited it to make you look bad.

Discussions need to be durable, IMO.
By Slither at Jun 12, 2026, 5:12 AM | 2
Have you considered just making forum posts able to be corrupted or something instead?

Consider a topic as a quasi-node that has its own ICE associated with it. If that ICE is below a certain value, the topic's contents become increasingly scrambled the further it gets towards a floor value, and once it gets bottomed out, the topic becomes temporarily unretrievable until someone bothers to reset the ICE or until Gridworks intervenes. The content is never actually altered or modified, it just gets garbled or people become unable to access it readily.

On the flipside, a decker can choose to rebuild a topic's ICE, increasing its score to a MUCH larger margin above the fully-visible threshold. Maybe even just leave this uncapped. Add in daemon functionality to watch for either a particular forum or a particular topic being affected.

At least this way they wouldn't just be a straight upgrade over nodes for sharing information.
By Ameliorative at Jun 12, 2026, 5:29 AM | 1
I will always oppose the idea of information automatically degrading/getting corrupted. It's already a Sisyphean task to pass down the culture and history of Withmore through each new generation of immies. Sometimes scattered forum threads are all we have for people to learn about how things used to be.
By svetlana at Jun 12, 2026, 9:01 AM | 4
It'd only get corrupted if someone deliberately messed with it, and another decker could even more easily fix it again.
By Ameliorative at Jun 12, 2026, 1:24 PM | 2
Forum threads being entirely untouchable except by moderators seems like a massive blind-spot. If you want something to be impossible to fuck with, why bother with a node when you can just throw it all in a thread and forget about it. Countless times I've seen things that would be better served as a node thrown in a thread because that way you know it's untouchable.

As for passing down the culture, there's always oral tradition, or printed materials, recordings, a node (especially now that you can back up its contents) all kinds of things. But, again, the proposed change wouldn't even be permanent. It'd be *temporarily* corrupting a post until another decker goes in and fixes it. If deckers can do all this other shit, it seems a little silly that the Metro Chat is the one part of the Grid locked down like Fort Knox.

(Edited by Baguette at 4:39 pm on 6/12/2026)

By Baguette at Jun 12, 2026, 4:35 PM | 1
One of the most heartbreaking things to see has been nodes been getting "reclaimed". Whole nodes and pages and pages of text someone compiled or wrote just smashed out of existence forever with absolutely no trace - not even skilled deckers can reach it. Its literally deleted. I've had this beef with the grid since 3.0, even as a Corporate player who benefitted from their removal.
It does feel a bit impossible to balance. I want people to have places they can say illegal or negative things about the corps. I don't have a good solution for it. Maybe if we had a darkweb type deal? Im just not well versed enough in techy things to know how to structure something like that or how it might work within the hefty lore of the megacorps.
I would love for there to be a public grid - both nodes and forums - but also more underground.

(Edited by Papertiger at 11:08 pm on 6/12/2026)

By Papertiger at Jun 12, 2026, 11:07 PM | 0
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