Thank you for the response. I waited a bit before responding because there are certain design and usability aspects I'm encountering with Clearspace that run powerfully against my experience as a software developer, and a digital library researcher. I wanted to take some time to meditate on a response that would be constructive.
You see, I took Software Engineering class with Brewster Kahle at MIT. When he said that human indexing was going away to be replaced by WAIS, I was skeptical. In fact, WAIS failed but was the genesis of the sort of full text searching we've grown accustomed to via google. In order for that kind of searching to succeed certain aspects of usability, and culture had to grind on for a few years. Even so, books still ship with the simple table of contents and human-created index.
I had trouble making use of the basic Clearspace keyword paradigm because, quite franly, the search box was placed too far away from the active area of the page inhabited by the discussion application frame. Once I realized that it WAS the search box I was supposed to use, I then issued searches of the sort that might lead me to the discussion we are now having. I had very little confidence in the results, and I consider that a because of combination of my aesthetic and cultural prejudice about the interface.
Having been in software for long enough to be considered an "old fart", I've seen far too many brilliant new approaches lost because their implementations did not build a bridge from the old way of use to the new way. I fear Clearspace suffers from this malady.
I need to find a way to provide the familiar "simple hierarchical" discussion my customers are familiar with. Offering a keyword search in addition would serve the goal of introducing the new Clearspace discussion paradigm, and would allow that paradigm to merge into the culture of how people do discussions.
Putting the hierarchy I seek into sub-spaces, if I understand how sub-spaces work, would actually preclude use of the new paradigm, because the searches would not span all sub-spaces. (But I'm very new to this and might just be wrong here.)
I am presently assessing whether it is easier to bolt on somebody else's threaded discussion system to provide something familiar to my customers, or to go to the trouble of learning your new paradigm, and crafting the necessary user interface to provide that familiar interface. I am in a hurry, so whichever thing seems easier will be what I do.
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Bottom line: You seem to be pushing a new paradigm at the expense of the very necessary transition effort.
