Show HN: We built a platform for forums and called it Microcosm

Author here.

Microcosm is the first startup by us, and it's taken a while to get out of the door as customer feedback changed our initial plan and most of our priorities.

The initial plan was to take forums and evolve them into a flipboard/Verge style magazine of user-generated content. But actually people just wanted really good forums that were more capable of providing tools that communities needed. This mostly came down to "We want events and other stuff to be organised where the people are hanging-out", and we found that the magazine approach set expectations that people were consumers rather than creators of content.

We are a Shopify or Tumblr, but for forums.

And the obvious question amongst the HN crowd is how do we stack up to Discourse? The answer is that the forum market is HUGE and we see Discourse being the equivalent of a Wordpress (a comparison they themselves have made) whilst we are the equivalent of Tumblr. We're a hosted platform obsessed with simplicity for the admin and users, not an installable piece of software.

An example of what we're doing: http://forum.islington.cc/

A forum on that site: http://forum.islington.cc/microcosms/114/ Note that events exist within forums and not in a separate global calendar.

An event page: http://forum.islington.cc/events/79/

Another example: http://forum.espruino.com/

A conversation with images, code and video: http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/706/

Ask me anything.

Thanks.

And I've just changed it to a dollar amount.

Here's hoping deploying that landing site under load won't break anything.

Congrats on the launch, David and team. Quick first impressions from trying this out now:

1. The Persona sign up surprised me a bit. I'm ok with it, but if you're aiming at non-tech folks, it might be a bit of a problem. Do you offer a normal email+pwd signup too?

2. I chose a name for my forum and signed up with Persona. After logging in, I'm expecting to see my forum, but this is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/lWG9Ta0.png

Not sure what to do, maybe I need to click "Add a site"? When I do, I realise it's for creating another forum.

Oh I didn't know I was making an account which allowed me to make multiple forums! Also, using "site" and "forum" interchangeably threw me off.

3. Ok, so what I was first looking at after signing in was my dashboard. So now I go back there, and I notice the tiny greyed out link babies.microco.sm. Click on it and it takes me to: http://i.imgur.com/FI5HKPF.png

"This is such a new site that there are no forums."

Now I'm really confused. A site has multiple forums?

So I'm not logged into my own forum? Click on Sign in or Register in the top right corner.

Persona again! Now, as a forum owner nerd I might be ok with it, but other users of my forum almost certainly won't be.

Anyway, sign in. Then click on "Create your first forum" and get these two questions: http://i.imgur.com/75GNpQ6.png

"What is the name of the forum?" and "What is the forum about?"

But I thought I already answered these questions when I first signed up!! -> http://i.imgur.com/QirI0Sx.png

Anyway, I do that and then my forum is finally created and I was able to make a post and reply to it. The Microco.sm logo on my site/forum is confusing. It'd be nicer if you used the name of my site by default instead.

That's probably enough for you to go on for the initial UX :)

Caveats: I've never run a forum and I'm unlikely to do so in the near future. I did this purely as an exercise to try your app out. So, take it with a giant boulder of salt.

Thanks for the feedback.

On #1 and #2 on the landing page... I agree with both. Those line drawings looked way worse with teeth, so our relative perception is that these are better, but we shall revisit it.

On the more critical things with the product...

#1. Too much whitespace.

This has been a hard fight for us, that single issue, as the vast majority of forums set the font far too small (10px) but information density is high. We've used vBulletin and phpBB as our compare point and we show 8 items per page where the default theme from those would show 10, but ours are far more readable. We think our defaults are fairly good, but want much more active sites so that we can create meaningful A/B tests on the front sizes and white space. It's definitely one of the more frequent pieces of feedback.

#2. Started and Replied are extremely critical.

Remove them and engagement drops off. Started helps people choose, from the newer items, which ones they want to read and reply to, based on who started it. Replied is extraordinary, remove it and people do not go into the item and make their own reply, they stop engaging with it. People tend to hit the page of items, scan for who made the last reply and when, and then make the decision to go into it. The ones who make the most comments navigate by the engagement of others, not by the topics and subject of the items.

We experimented with that, and even the absence of the last author's name on the list of forums continues to generate feedback. We think we can just about get away with that one, but the numbers are strongly against removing them from the item list.

#3. Agree wholeheartedly, a number of designs are possible but our defaults today are equivalent to Twitter customisation.

We plan 3 levels of theming and customisation and they are all effectively supported already but not yet available for a number of dull reasons.

The first: Twitter customisation: Logo, background colour/image, font colour. We support this today.

The second: Upload your own CSS (with some security restrictions), or pick from a theme gallery.

The third: Fork https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb , put it on Heroku, and fundamentally change all HTML, CSS, UX, everything.

Today we only expose #1, and anyone can go do #3 already. #2 is designed for, but we haven't yet built the security bit.

We do have some far more attractive examples of forum than the ones I've shared, but they're currently testing their communities and it would not be right for me to make them public before they are ready. We will definitely update the linked examples of forums once some of the really good looking ones go public.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely put the vertical height A/B test back on the urgent todo list for when the numbers will make it meaningful.

Take a look at something called Project Ivory (http://pivory.com) for excellent spacing and font size defaults. Yours are indeed aimed at people reading on very large monitors while leaning back in their chairs.