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Show HN: Natika – Simple PHP Forum for Developers

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Re: Show HN: Natika – Simple PHP Forum for Developers

#15

Post by knight17 »

Looking at the compose window, I feel there is scope to simplify it by removing some infrequently applied elements. Who creates h1, h2 h3, h4 and h5 headings in forum posts. In the order of frequent use, it is link, quote, bold, italics, picture, and attachment buttons that are frequently used. Other buttons could be hidden or even removed without creating friction.

It looks really pleasing. I especially like that it doesn't give too much space to display avatar and user information such as join date, user category, posts and so on like many traditional forums that always used more vertical space than many one or two sentence replies, eating up vertical space.

Re: Show HN: Natika – Simple PHP Forum for Developers

#20

Post by buro9 »

anton_gogolev wrote: post #18

Mediumization of the design. Why would I want to ever see a 300px "hero unit" in a forum , of all places? It's excellent that there's no visual noise of taglines, statuses, achievements and other crap like that, though.

> Mediumization of the design. Why would I want to ever see a 300px "hero unit" in a forum , of all places?

Above each of the forum topic spaces, you would not.

But on the home page? Absolutely.

A lot of forums, especially the small and medium ones, do not have any other software running than the forum. There is no blog, no shop, no nothing... just the forum software for the community to use.

For them to be able to present a home page that communicates clearly and quickly to visitors what the site is about is a boon.

It's one of the things I regret not putting into Microcosm from the outset.

For example here is a cycle club using the forum we wrote: http://forum.islington.cc/ and because we only gave them the forum bit, they went and created a static page elsewhere to act as the home page: http://www.islington.cc/

If we had done a better job at allowing branding and communication on the home page, that would've avoided them needing to create a second thing... and reduced friction with more function would have helped us both.

This feels to me like one of those "what I (the techie) think they want" vs "what they (the community owner and customer) think they want"... the hero unit is actually a good place in between the two.

Oh, and it's worth me mentioning that Microcosm failed ( https://microco.sm/ ), that story is here: https://medium.com/tech-london/the-journey-of-a-london-start... yet the software still exists on Github, and the number of sites and users on my personal instance continues growing (over 300 sites, over 70k users) with the largest single site being https://www.lfgss.com/ .

What Natika will learn is that it's hard to build new communities on a new platform, and that it's hard to migrate existing ones. I with them luck.

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