Thank you for your patience with this Community platform, and especially for your patience with the new Community platform.
The new Community platform is so problematic, that it really doesn’t make any sense to try to rehabilitate it. Better to start fresh.
I will be overseeing the set-up of a new, better platform, which will be developed by Blake, who some of you may know.
This time, we want to make sure we get the right platform. And for that we need your help.
We’re looking for something that works out of the box (without a lot of development required), that is user-friendly, and that has powerful (and non labor-intensive) spam defenses.
We need to hear from any of you who have had extensive experience using other platforms, whether as a user or as an admin. Which platform do you like best, and why? What key features does it have? What is it missing? Which platforms should we avoid?
The more careful thought and information that goes into this thread, the better it will be when you all get the forum platform that such a vibrant, intelligent, and important community truly deserves.
I can’t even figure out how to use the new community, which is a pain and can be off putting for new users. The only thing I would like to see would to have various topics/threads have designated areas. I don’t know that much about code (not as much as I used to know).
Just imagine this forum, but having the main forums page look like this:
Econ Theory
Thread
Thread
Thread
Thread
Philosophy
Thread
Thread
Thread
Thread
Political Theory
Thread
Thread
Thread
Thread
Current News and Politics
etc.
Miscellaneous & Daily Life
etc.
That’s as far as I can think of, which would make it easier to keep track of new threads instead of having slightly older threads get thrown under the bus of page 2 and beyond. It really doesn’t seem that hard to me; add subpages for those topics that would only contain those threads (with the exception of having all previous threads thrown into those subpages, but seeing how you can currently select what type of post it would be I guess previous pages would be point into new categories by default).
Plus, if there was a new forum it would suck to have forum 1 and forum 2, that this forum would turn into a ghost town when all our posts are here.
I’m personally a big fan of phpBB and its derivatives. Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is also nice IMO. However, that’s just from a user perspective - I have no idea how easy/difficult they are to set up and maintain. Also, PHP is one of my least favorite programming languages ever.
As others suggested, another approach is to fix the current forum software, but it doesn’t sound like you want to do that.
When I had a website and a forum to go with it I used phpBB. It took me about 20 minutes to set up the forum. It wasn’t thematicaly unified with the design of the website or anything like that, but it worked fine and all. I had hundreds of users who used it to schedule tournament clan matches (dozens of matches tieing about 15-16 people for up to three hours), to get the referees for each and to comment on the matches and the course of competition, and there weren’t any complaints about the forum itself.
So personally I have good experiences with using/running a phpBB forum (though I can’t say to be the biggest forum admin guru out there).
As a user, I’ve always liked UBB forums. It’s customizable, simple to navigate, and formating posts is much easier. Not to mention using UBB code in posts is pretty simple and intuitive.
I can’t comment on it’s spam defenses other than to say I don’t recall there being a problem with spammers cluttering up any of the UBB messageboards I’ve encountered over the years. For bothersome trolls and their ilk, I believe UBB offers an IP-blocking tool to prevent reregistration following a ban.
The decision to split forums into several sections should only happen when there are way too many threads to keep track of, and we are nowhere near that now. Any subscriber can simply view the unread threads, nothing gets “thrown under the bus.” Keep in mind that splitting the forums into sections results in fewer views for each item, more clicking around to see all the new posts, people skipping important threads because they don’t figure X thread will be in Y subsection, and most of all anyone who’s spent much time here knows that a discussion of rent controls can quickly morph into a titanic debate about nukes and geopolitics. This will be even more the case when we have proper comment tree-threading like reddit or even Daily Paul have now (but please retain the ability to post media inline!). The newbie figures he’s only interested in political theory, so he never even looks at the economics or history subsections. I’ve seen many forums needlessly diluted by this splitting up into sections. You can always allow the user to see any type of posts they want to filter for, but the default initial presentation has got to show all threads, at least until these forums grow to two or three times their current size. Tree-threading should help reduce the number of top-level threads as well.
