71–80 of 86 posts
No nesting. Is this 2004? How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.
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Flat forums are strictly worse than nested forums for in-depth discussion. Being someone who has, in the past, been active on several different `traditional' forums, I'd agree with that. You end up with a complete mess of people quoting posts that can sometimes be several pages back, or -- worse -- replying to posts several pages back without quoting, which just causes confusion.
I think that depends on the audience of a forum. I'm a pretty regular poster at the SomethingAwful forums, which still utilizes a flat, quoted forum style. Say what you want about SA, but the average poster is pretty good. We routinely carry on huge megathread discussions about a single topic with no difficulty. Just pop into any of the subforums and check it out. The Recipes subforum, for example, may have a huge me…
No nesting. Is this 2004? How are you supposed to follow a conversation more than two posts deep? This is PHPBB with more javascript.
Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation. They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody gets lost. All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solu…
I admire Jeff as a person, the whole Stack Exchange network is amazing but Discourse needs some serious thinking applied to it. If Jeff wants to release a decent forum application, he should look to Vanilla for inspiration: http://vanillaforums.org/ — in my opinion, Vanilla is probably the cleanest and best forum application out there today. PHPBB and MyBB feel horribly dated and vBulletin is expensive and looks like…
I ported a vBulletin forum to a custom Rails app, and rolling a notification system is THE feature that inspired me. Meanwhile, on a conventional vBulletin forum, you're arduously making the rounds to see if anyone is even responding to you. It's hilarious.
Definitely one of the things that Discourse gets right!
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Turns out people are actually very, very good at following a conversation. They hold the state in their heads. Try going to a bar and sitting at a table with eight or nine people at it. If you could write a transcript you'd see the conversation spiralling, branching, merging and branching again. And nobody gets lost. All a forum has to do is record who said something and in what order. Threading is a ridiculous "solu…
I would argue that the problem with flat forums is that people have to hold a lot of state in their heads to follow the conversation.
And that is as bad an idea for conversation as it is for h.264.
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Nesting (and reordering by votes or activity) works well for divergent discussions: expressing views, exploring the possibility space, brainstorming. Or: exhibition . Flat (and stably ordered by time) offers some hope for a convergence of viewpoints, or at least shared-narrative and common-knowledge. Or: deliberation .
Which are presumably both useful to have within the same community. Maybe forum software should allow individual threads to be made flat or nested, at the discretion of the person creating the thread?
(Remembering, as always, that it's not exclusively a goal for software design to solve, but also and probably primarily up to the participating people and their behavior... who can and do bend any offerings from the designers/coders to their own ends.)
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I've built a few different discussiony things. When I was building one for the Long Now a decade ago, I was going to put in threading. Because features are good. Stewart Brand, who started The WELL, talked me out of it. His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly. My default now is to leave them out. There are some contexts where lots of ar…
>"His point that stuck with me is that a major effect of threaded discussions is to improve the ability to bicker endlessly." This is called "having a conversation". In flat discussions you can't bicker endlessly because a large portion of the posts are just replying to the OP. There isn't as much back-and-forth or progression of the discussion. Discussions tend to get only a few levels deep. The only time anybody ha…
For people who really want a conversation, I think a forum should support some way to privately contact one another. And a good ability to start new discussions. But for general-audience, broad-appeal forums, I think threads usually create more problems then they solve.
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I hate phpbb and their ilk and use them often in forums for the tight, obscure subcultures that I'm a part of. I don't think phpbb gives a sense of community. I think a sense of community makes people willing to put up with the barfy fugliness of phpbb. On the other, discourse actually just seems to have a different kind of ugliness rather than a good design or a good interface. Why do they all have a banner/header t…
You must have a really small screen with low resolution.
The thing about phpbb-type board is that they encourage the people who them up to put huge graphics on the masthead, so the average subcultural board is actually going to be significantly larger than a pure default install.
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Threaded comments—like here, on HN, and on Reddit—easily spiral out of control. It's especially hard to come back later and see what's new. Many people seem to have missed this, but Discourse solves the problem in a particularly elegant way. Each topic is about, well, a single topic. The conversation flows as a series of replies, ordered chronologically. If, however, you'd like to change the topic, there's a "Reply a…
> Threaded comments—like here, on HN, and on Reddit—easily spiral out of control. It's especially hard to come back later and see what's new. Then have multiple views of the same data, so you can see it threaded, oldest first, newest first, etc.
I took me a while to figure this out but since the design and presentation of a board, a board should have none, zero, alternate views. Instead, a board needs good defaults.