It has become very clear that Logos 5 has been designed to share a lot of information in the background to develop a 'community' view of our resources. To be honest right now I have not decided whether this is a good or bad thing.
However there are a few things that bother me about this approach.
- The users are not given a choice, this may be acceptable for new Logos 5 users but some of us purchased a standalone product and have become 'community' users through a series of upgrades.
- The amount of data involved will grow over time and inevitably means that there will either be:
- An increase in the data being replicated to each users PC, disk space may be cheaper now than it was but it can become a scarce resource especially on older PCs.
- An increase in network access of remote data which means that Logos performance is linked to the quality of a users Internet connection. Not a problem for a developer on a LAN with the servers but a serious issued for users with broadband.
- The extra code for processing and displaying the community information has the potential to slow the program down.
As highlighted elsewhere setting Internet to OFF is not a realistic option as this prevents the user from receiving important updates.
As I said at the start I'm really nor sure what I think of 'community' features, I may grow to like them but right now it feels like another example of the Logos developers doing things because they can rather than because they are of genuine benefit to the average user.
With this in mind I would like to see a system setting for 'Community Features' that can be set to OFF.
