complications, complications. adding facebook - although fun to do and likely to be necessary to the success of the site - was not necessarily a smart move right now!

making a facebook application is surprisingly straightforward. there's pyfacebook, with the example code being good enough to just work. fortunately, it uses django: i'd been playing with django so only needed 8 hours to "get started".

the complication is this: what, exactly, do i do with all the facebook users?? that might not be clear until you appreciate that the developer TOS requires that you NOT store any information on a user (except for optimisation purposes, and only then for 24 hours) except for their uid, primary network id and a few other pieces.

name? nope. sex? nope. list of friends? nope.

so... ermmm... we have all these "site" users, and we have all these "facebook" users... now.. whom do you allow to talk to whom?

and ... do you allow facebook users to obtain information about site-registered users, and vice-versa?

do you allow facebook users to send messages? what about messages in the chatrooms, do you allow the facebook users to see the IRC messages from site-registered users?

answers: no, no, no, no, no and.... no :)

like i said, it's suddenly got a bit hairy.

i was planning to add in "ignore" lists, and now i've had to put in the hooks to do that a bit earlier than intended.

bugzilla

i managed to get bugtracker installed: searches show that if you use perl 5.10 then you're screwed: you have to edit the setup scripts. bugtracker "testing" version hasn't filtered down yet... had to do it manually.

bugtrackers. amazingly useful. they keep you on track - keep you going when you would otherwise stop... you can't avoid the insistent list and the insistent pings of the email reminders... :)