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I don’t like the flat style comments of sites like PhpBB. Is there an equivalent open source solution that does reddit style hierarchical comments?
Honestly no body should use PhpBB when Discourse exists.
They may be interested in doing it but the UX seem so out of place for most of them that they won't even try. Also, the missing "app/notifications" makes them forget quickly that it exists and they may never come back.
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The way reddit's threads work with nested replies is also a vastly superior UX over the linear firehose approach of a conventional forum. So much so that pretty much everyone has resorted to copying it over the last 15 years. There's a reason phpbb went the way of the dinosaur and won't be making a comeback. The future is going to be something that learns from Reddit's mistakes without regressing to 2001 usability.
The flat sequential thread was a reaction to threaded messages as seen on Usenet and mailing lists. It works reasonably well if users are careful to quote the messages they're responding to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_threading#/media/...
VS
https://preview.redd.it/r7k2gf1kav6z.png?auto=webp&s=9fd7a0b...
I think the flat sequential thread works fine with a limited number of messages. Eventually with enough replies it degrades to being very unwieldy like traditional forums.
Most people don't want to admit it, but running a subreddit is much more fun than running your own forum. Even if you magically had the users, you also have the FULL responsibility , up to the legal consequnces for the stuff that your users do, plus you have all the technical trouble. Reddit gives that for free to moderators. They can make any community for shits n giggles, break it, fix it, abandon it etc. and none…
Being an admin vs a mod is certainly different but if you’re up to the task it can be much, much more fun than being a mod on somebody else’s website, ESPECIALLY if your gripe with the other person’s website is with admin behavior.
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See, this is one of many reasons why I'm sad we still use usernames/passwords for so many sites. I'm much more likely to register for a site if it supports 3rd-party auth instead of managing another password. It's too bad we don't have a properly open way to do that -- no "auth with this address" but instead a fixed hand-coded list of FB, Google, etc.
Is it really a lot of effort "managing" a password when your browser will literally create, pre-fill, and save those credentials for you? Valid argument in 2003. Not so much in 2023.
Yeah, no... Everybody I know that once ran PhpBB stopped using it because they would always get overrun by spam bots.
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It looks like thread replies are presented sequentially rather than nested. Is this something you're looking to support in the future?
No, classic forums never really offered threaded discussions alike to HN or Reddit. IPB and vBulletin had "threaded" mode where you would see a tree of replies, but it would only display a single reply, requiring you to manually select next reply to see in the UI. In future I plan to track which post the poster clicked "reply" for and have UI to let you see direct replies to given posts, or see that post was made as…
Reddit, Digg etc became popular partly _because_ of threading.
I don’t like the flat style comments of sites like PhpBB. Is there an equivalent open source solution that does reddit style hierarchical comments?
