I agree.
I spruced up my own MyBB forum the last two days (it’s very customizable and easily so), and it looks great now (imo):
From today on Facebook (after I asked about it):
Am I the only one who sees enormous irony that improvements to this community are announced on facebook rather than here? Sorta says everything doesn’t it?
What’s more ironic is that the last forum upgrade was what broke the forum.
Nielso,
This is where the new community will be: http://community.mises.org, if you want to get a head start. It’s been up for months but I don’t know when it will be finished.
Yes, I’ve seen it. It’s a bbPress forum ( http://bbpress.org/ ). I suppose it follow more or less the philosophy of wordpress: good basic functionality and then expandable with plugins and themes. It’s so bare that you have to expand dozens of features. You need a plugin for posting with codes, for avatars, for images, for quoting, for youtube embeds, etc, etc. I suppose this can work, but developing it to the way you want is more difficult, and from the bbpress forums that I have seen ( http://bbshowcase.org/forums/view/top100 ) I’m not that impressed with what people have come up with.
But it does appear that all the elements required are there and you can make it proper. It just seems easier to use MyBB (or another ‘regular’ forum software), where you have much more right out of the box. This also seems the reason why it has taken so long for Mises to get this going. If you have a team of volunteers, you can have a forum (such as MyBB) up in a matter of days, fully configured and easy to maintain.
If your volunteers building the community don’t use or mod/admin the community, you’re flying blind during development. As far as I know, there has never been outreach to the people who have been here for 4 or 5 years to help. It’s always some outside volunteer who doesn’t have to eat at the table he built.
I’m guessing that our forum accounts will be migrated.
Agreed. I automatically assumed them to be part of that team (or even exclusively that team).
I’m not working on. As far as I know, no other mod is working on it, although I think DJS might be working on it.
Nielso, volunteer on the project.
I would volunteer. But there is nobody I can offer it to because Jeffrey Tucker nor anyone else is responding to email or questions elsewhere. I’m suspecting this is because Jeffrey and the technical people (I have no idea who they are) have an idea of what they want and are not interested in any deviation from it.
Email DJS.
Anything is better than this current software unfortunately. If the quote button actually does what it is supposed to do, that would be a huge step forward. I dislike the compatability issues with Opera… 
I don’t what that stands for/who that is. The Mises faculty page lists David Veksler as Lead developer. Is that him?
edit: Oh, you mean Sanchez.
Yes, Daniel James Sanchez.
Jeffrey passed your comments on to me. I would be one of those “technical people” 
I’ll confess up front that I have not been eating “at this table” (the old teligent community system) and thus am not versed in the specific grievances you might have with it. All I know is that everyone hates it (members and admins), and thus I’ve been trying (amongst other mises projects) to get the new community off the ground. I got close some months ago, and am now back on the job…
I am a wordpress developer by trade, and have been responsible for nearly all of the migration to linux/apache/mysql/php for the blog, academy, wiki, etc.
While I agree that putting up a standard phpBB/myBB forum would be rather simple (and would serve very well as a forum), the choice to go with the wordpress multisite / buddypress system for the new community was based on the desire to have the community be more than just forums - to continue to allow users to host their own content (blogs), socialize/connect (groups/members), and discuss (forums). The old Teligent software we’ve been running here covered all those bases, but it’s too expensive, too closed, and too hated.
Of course, wordpress does blogs like no other, and phpBB (+variants) do forums like no other - but the Mises universe already had so many separate systems, each with their own login accounts, that spawning even more was not desired. Wordpress/Buddypress was the best solution for open, free software that covered all the bases while allowing for a single userbase.
The weaker link in the new system is definitely bbPress (the forums inside Buddypress), as it doesn’t have the developer base that Wordpress does, and so development goes much more slowly. I’ve only recently got tinyMCE (rich-text) editor working for forum posts (you’d think that would have been in the core long ago), and I’d love it if someone could solve the issue of threaded replies…
There are some very close updates to Buddypress and to the social-network integration component Buddystream which should help a lot. Stay tuned for more updates…
Sounds like good stuff.
Thanks, Israel.
Neilso,
You can follow some (but not all) of the tech talk here:
http://groups.google.com/group/misesdev/topics?pli=1
I haven’t been able to find much forum stuff there, but you might be able to chip in your 2c.
Okay,
I’m beginning to warm up to the concept. I see what the function of a Group is now (though I don’t know if it’s usable in practise, maybe you can explain how it will work?), and it is nice if users of the ‘community’ can post their own blog in Wordpress style.
As far as threaded replies go: Do you mean with indentation, similar to Wordpress blog comments? Because I don’t think that’s very readable in forums. Take zerohedge.com for example, their comments are an absolute disaster. It could possibly work if it was collapsable. I would say quoting with a statement who you’re quoting and a link to the original post is the way to go. Very standard for forums.
I would also get rid of one post gray background next post white background. It’s not calm to the eyes.
Why a rich text editor? Activating links and posting youtube videos is too much of a bother with it, especially for new users. Copy-pasting is also a problem with them because mark-up is brought over. No major forums use it, and for good reasons.
The way to do effective tree-threading for posts is this:
The Active Topics page looks the same. But when you click on a thread, instead of going straight to all posts, it expands a map of the thread itself. It shows who replied to the OP and the branching trees of replies to each person. Personal arguments between two posters you don’t care about form one single branch that is separate from the rest.
OP
1st reply to OP (just the poster’s name is shown)
Reply to the 1st reply (again just the poster’s name)
Reply to the reply to the 1st reply
Angry personal reply
Angry response
[More flaming personal stuff…]
Another reply to the first reply
Reply to OP
Reply to the second reply
Reply to the reply to the second reply
[Interesting conversation develops between two discussants…]
Reply to OP
Reply to OP
So if you see a long, snaking back and form exchange between two people you don’t want to read, you can completely ignore it. You don’t have to scroll past it in this lame vertical format. This makes it actually possible to go off on tangents in threads without destroying the main thread and making it unreadable after the second page, as is now the norm. It makes it way easier to follow the discussion as it branches out into various sub-discussions, instead of how it currently always peters out or turns into a cacophony of different arguments that only the most careful and dedicated can keep track of, with people constantly wondering who’s replying to whom, and having to include some kind of quote to make that clear when there is otherwise no need.
The only disadvantage to that is you have click on each individual post to read it, but that could be remedied by having a button to “Expand all posts replying to this one.”
Or you could do it like Reddit, or even better, like LessWrong.
I have a suggestion for the new forum:
Make it so that by default private messages are enabled and that users opt out of them.
Here we have so that they disabled and users opt in to have them enabled.