141–150 of 150 posts
Modding phpBB and starting new forums using phpBB (and later Invision Community) got me into php dev and basically the job and career I now have. Such a great product for building communities. It would be so good having this feeling again browsing forums on this software. The Subsilver theme was iconic and legendary.
That's made my afternoon! I had good fun making the original subsilver and prosilver themes all those years ago :)
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?
> A structured discussions platform — brings together the main features from StackOverflow, Slack, Discourse, Reddit/HackerNews, and Disqus blog comments.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22702311
I wonder if it's possible to create a Lemmy community that behaves like a PhpBB forum, that is, threads are supposed to be long-lived, so they are not sorted by age, comments are supposed to be single topic, so they are not sorted by thread, and you can jump right into the last thing you saw. It looks like a great experience to after you publish something, you just go and create a Lemmy instance (with closed down reg…
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I never understood the appeal of Discourse. It feels heavy with an overutilization of negative space. The D programming language forum is a good example of a well-designed forum in my opinion.
If you want to use something lighter, Flarum exists, modern but lightweight built using PHP. The grapheneOS forum uses, but I like discord because its more advanced with many features and integrations.
I wonder if it's possible to create a Lemmy community that behaves like a PhpBB forum, that is, threads are supposed to be long-lived, so they are not sorted by age, comments are supposed to be single topic, so they are not sorted by thread, and you can jump right into the last thing you saw. It looks like a great experience to after you publish something, you just go and create a Lemmy instance (with closed down reg…
Well, there's this https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
My question was more on the lines of adding an enum into a community's data saying this is a forum|discussion.
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It’s more complicated. Topics in a forum are ordered by last answer. So, if usually most discussion are short lived, any topic can also can be revived at any time.
Which is usually called "necroposting" and is universally frowned on for... some reason. I never really got why, but on-line communities are strange beasts, and most tend to have a culture actively opposing accumulation and surfacing of knowledge.
Honestly no body should use PhpBB when Discourse exists.
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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…
I think threading is the killer feature that allowed spaces like Reddit to so thoroughly replace "classic forums" over the last 13 years.
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Imagine this thread without threading. It would be 30% of its current value. Reddit, Digg etc became popular partly _because_ of threading.
But Reddit/Digg are commentary sites, and most forums aren't.
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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.
Nested replies are definitely better as a way of consuming a post and its comments once and then never thinking about it again. For an asynchronous discussion between several people they get unwieldy after a few rounds of replying. They also make it harder to coherently reference points made cross-tree. That plus algorithmic ranking gives a constant feeling of "gotta refresh to see if there's new stuff" that serves a…
Here's the usability problem: You're 40 pages deep in a 100 page discussion and you see someone asked a question that you also want to know the answer to. How do you weed through the comments in the remaining 60 pages to find only answers to this question and relevant tangents? I've yet to see a conventional forum come up with a solution that doesn't involve a lot of friction or potential for missed information.
It is far too common for a forum's built in search tool to fail me for some reason or another, leading me to manually scan the entire thread. I may be willing to do that work if the information I am seeking is very important, but will I still feel that way if I just have a hunch that maybe I can provide my own input for someone else?