Moot.it: Forums and commenting re-imagined

I don't think this will make a good general forum. The comment box is small. It doesn't look like it would promote lengthy responses with images / video and whatever else.

For me the main problem with forums like phpBB is noise from signatures / profiles / layouts etc and noise from nonsense responses. Often the best response will be buried in page 2 or 3. 5 people will be having conversations back and forth and everything gets mixed up.

I think the closest thing to a good forum for me is stackoverflow. Where the best responses float to the top. Similarly reddit handles separate conversations really well with the way it nests responses.

That isn't to say Moot doesn't have its merits. For providing support this looks pretty handy. Its zippy and the small comment boxes promote quick and to the point responses. For a general content based forum though this currently looks inadequate. I could also see this being useful as a message board for a development team. That kind of utility.

Keeping customers inside the site is a priority for some (vs. pushing some discussions to say zendesk) and this fits in perfectly.

btw, may be make the 'try live demo' link a bit prominent and have a hint about how to close the fullscreen carousel on the homepage? had me confused there for a moment.

I’m creating a new forum CMS in Django for fun basically, if anyone wants to kick the tires of it and try something newer than the usual CMSes: http://pygm.us/nPrOiHJo. I don’t know which Greek letter you’d use for its progress, but it is not in any way close to a beta. It can be deployed to dotCloud in a handful of steps, though.

Disregard the Travis CI build failure; I think it was just a time-out on their end.

It’s funny, because I don’t really think it’s imperative to reimagine forums; they are perfectly fine, but it is next to impossible to build a business model around them, which leaves us with some very unsatisfactory and ancient CMSes to use.

I see so many awful CMSes, and it bothers me that we don’t have anything better to use. I’m delighted to see moot.it take a crack at it. I honestly can’t recall anyone else who tried to make an interesting business around forums ... ever? At least outside China.

So regardless of how moot.it looks and works at the moment, they should really be commended for just trying where others have given up without even bothering. As someone who has worked on a forum CMS, I can attest that there are so many small things in forums you need to implement and get right, that you end up with a road map light years long.

What I am saying is that I commend moot.it for just trying. Some of the comments here suggest that there are dozens of great forum CMSes to choose from, which I don’t find to be the case. Better to help them polish the software, because the alternatives are few and often unsatisfactory.

Wow, Pivory is clean and well done, no threading though, a shame.

Well there should be nothing stopping you from writing lengthy, thoughtful posts – there is no 160 character limit, (in fact, there's no limit). There are line breaks, paragraph breaks, syntax highlight, black and white (vectorized) unintrusive smileys... And the text box does expand while you type (unlike the one I'm typing into now) and shows you a preview underneath it. Images/video are kind of separate from discussion and tend to draw all attention (you already mentioned signature/etc), but if it's what you need, then this is not the solution for now.