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Bring back crappy forums

tedium.co

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Re: Bring back crappy forums

#121

Post by rplnt »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #116
rplnt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another option. Combining both threads and chronological order.

IMO that should be an option (twitter style, reddit style or chronological style). Wonder if there is browser extension for it. That said discord kinda does it and I just can't stand it. Unusable to me.

Discord threads are just an addon on top of a chat. It's not really a real discussion. And the discord discussions (or whatever it is called) are again flat IIRC? Slack threads are flat. Both are chat platforms first and foremost I would say.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#122

Post by davb »

I used to participate in a bunch of forums across an range of topics and in recent years considered starting one myself but with the OSA (Online Safety Act) in the UK, it’s not worth the personal risk.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#123

Post by postalcoder »

doginasuit wrote: post #33

> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different. I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the p…

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics.

What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds to thousands of comments that don't have a clue. In this world, influence concentrates around people with pre-release access to these products.

In the HN/Reddit paradigm, how do people impart their experiences with a model like Fable? You could submit a new blog post and some people will comment on that to discuss their experiences. You could do an Ask HN but those don't get much traction.

Old style forums were a pain in the butt to read but they were better for focused discussion over time.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#124

Post by interstice »

My biggest problem with old forums was googling a question, clicking on a post of someone asking that question, and the first response being some gate keeper saying this has been answered so many times use the search function.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#125

Post by parasti »

This made me realize that forums existed only because there was somebody willing to pay for domain, hosting and maintenance with money and time. As a result most had a bus factor of 1. All the forums I know died with their maintainer moving on - and even forums "resurrected" by a community member had that exact problem. There is space for a fully distributed forum that can't die with its maintainer.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#126

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

postalcoder wrote: post #123
doginasuit wrote: post #33

> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different. I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the p…

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics. What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds…

Forums handled this by bumping old threads to the top when a new comment was added. This post sorting method could play nicely with tree style comments

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#127

Post by mavhc »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #126
postalcoder wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downside with reddit-/hn-style comment is that, while they provide a superior UI for discussions, the liveliness of the discussions have a shelf life of a day. It makes it's hard to get a high quality discussion about new/breaking topics. What I mean is that, for new products, the threads that get the greatest discussion liquidity are those where not a single person knows a thing about it. So you'll get hundreds…

Forums handled this by bumping old threads to the top when a new comment was added. This post sorting method could play nicely with tree style comments

Bring back nntp

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#129

Post by DaSHacka »

hhjinks wrote: post #96
doginasuit wrote: post #33

> We tried the forum thing. We wanted something else. Not necessarily because it was better, though sure, maybe it was. But because it was different. I don't think the novelty explains very much, the digg/reddit comment tree format is a clear improvement in the sense that it makes it easier to find and track interesting discussions. I always liked the aspect that you could follow a coherent back and forth where the p…

Unironically, image boards are the best. All replies available chronologically, and you can click any post number to follow whatever thread of conversation you find interesting.

I do oftentimes find myself missing the ability to respond to multiple comments at once when perusing other sites like HN. It's super handy being able to quote a multitude of posts all asking the same question and respond with one answer. Or being able to redirect one poster to look at another.

Re: Bring back crappy forums

#130

Post by ErroneousBosh »

I actually run a forum, for a fairly niche technical subject. If anyone wants to have a nose about I'll post a link, but I'm not going to advertise.

It runs on FlaskBB[1] which is a pretty niche forum package (mine might be the only one running it in any volume). If you're good at Python, especially packaging, then we'd love to hear from you over at the project page ;-)

The forum has a couple of hundred regular visitors and maybe a couple of dozen regular posters (maybe a couple of posts a day from each, at its very busiest), so it's quite small.

It doesn't show up on Google because I don't run any adverts, so there's no money in it for them showing it in search results. This gives a better overall user experience, because no-one likes ads.

Moderation is down to splatting the odd spammer that slips through. Two countries are quite aggressively geoblocked because signups from them tend to only post either drug spam, pr0n spam, or hate speech. In both of those countries the forum has a couple of genuine posters who have contacted me, and I have poked a hole through for them. It's a minor amount of work.

The whole thing's running costs are probably between the inexpensive VPS and the domain name about 200 quid a year. I could probably recoup that from adverts, and in the early days I did experiment with running ads, but the reduction in quality of user experience was too great. I probably have about 60 quid's worth of Google ad revenue sitting from it.

Plans for the future for FlaskBB include making a proper Docker container of it and a Docker Compose example that'll spin up the FlaskBB software itself, the database, redis for cacheing, and the celery worker for sending stuff like password emails (seems a bit overkill to me to be honest but that's what the original author had).

I feel like if there was a nice simple "stick this docker-compose.yml in, adjust the settings in .env, and pull the string" approach we'd see more crappy oldschool forums. A low barrier to entry is probably good, right? And they say you should be the change you want to see ;-)

[1] https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb

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