I like this idea. And correct me if I am wrong, but it shouldn’t be to hard to implement since decks already keeps track of edits.
I would like some sort of tagging system even if @Alsciende decides to keep the immutable decks. It would make my own collection much more manageble.
How about implenting a group/guild system instead of implementing a “share private decks” function? Where people can share their decks even if they have not been published? That could be a nice middle ground.
From the database level, the only thing you need to do for my suggested system is create another relationship in the database where any deck can assign it’s “parent”. Then you either have chains (a tree of some sort; for netrunner players think daemon trees) or everyone points at the same point and you sort them by date order. Designing the UI if you go this way and making sure the whole thing is optimized is the real trick, but that’s not that unusual. Databases are usually pretty simple. The comments thing would require either date & time look ups (if they exist) or a conversion of the data and a new item to track linked version to say everything that exists is currently on version one of a deck, and then the increment can happen naturally as comments happen. The link is probably more robust, but it teathers you a bit more by binding items together in ways they weren’t before.
I think the real question is: is this usable? Alsciende has been a better judge of usability when implementing his website than I ever was in my short web endevours of yesteryear. So, I’d trust him to pick a good option when presented with most concerns. It’s probably more useful to him to hear what our use cases are. Things we want to be able to do. Rather than ways he could fix it or features he could implement.
I agree with @bblum. I have actually directed a number of developers I work with to your site as an example. Great Job!
I will say that as the game grows the number of decklists are going to grow as well, and many of them will be the same wether someone got the idea from another deck on netrunnerdb or from what they put together in a vacuum at their kitchen table. I suggest thinking of adding a metric which computes how close two decks are to one another and creating a sort of “hash table” notion where a person can start putting a deck together and see the names of other players (with links to their decks (published or shared) who have similar or identical decks. It would probably be a major database overhaul, but could scale really nicely if done right.
I have built lots of decks on NRDB that have gone unpublished and I only published the ones I was really proud of. I think that published decks should not be able to be edited.
[quote=“bblum, post:18, topic:4794”]
To address Dan’s concern you could simply add a button under options, next to “let me hand out view-private links” to also “let anyone look at a list of all my unpublished decks just by knowing my username”. [/quote]
Perfectly put. I also like the idea of a “you should publish this” button (or in other words, a “this interests me enough that I want a message thread for it” button 
)
Immutable decklists: good
Removing any current NRDB features: bad
Option to make your unpublished decklists public: good