I’d appreciate anything which makes it easy to “blend” in entries form other blogs. Worldwide. The other point is that I’m fed up with vading though reading how excellent I am and so one just to sell me another insurance. And yes it should not ask too many private details. I have a special disklike for everything named “social networking”, but I guess that’s a problem of mine.
And what I also would like to have. Is an excellent search facility for
posts from oneself (I do hate if someone does not come back to an argument because it may be a litle dated)
notification on changes in the threads one hasa participated in
I can’t tell of any of the forums where this things are fullfilled. But maybe someone here knows.
Tree-threading is more helpful the more propensity threads have to get derailed or to split into many sub-discussions, both of which are common daily occurences on these forums. My guess as to why linear forums are so common is a kind of “seen and unseen” problem: people don’t notice that the linear format hinders discussion because the tangential discussions are too unwieldy to continue simultaneously in the same thread, so most of them never come into existence in the first place. One way to mitigate this problem without tree-threading is to start a new thread whenever a tangential discussion starts, but that can be awkward and make the discussion feel less casual, almost like you’re calling the other person out.
I hope by “do paragraphs” you mean actually space between lines, because I don’t care to expend the focal energy it would take to wade through all that text…especially when quotes get involved. It’s almost as bad as some of the spam posts in the deleted area.
You keep mentioning “Less Wrong”. Do you have a link you could share that illustrates why it’s so great, like you did with the reddit above?
These two sentences do not seem to agree with each other.
That happens in forums all over the www all the time (I would say most of the time through moderator force) and it doesn’t seem to make people less likely to continue the discussion.
What could be a useful function is to be able create groups for the purpose of discussing with particular members however instead of syphoning this entirely off, like on here, you could have an option when posting a thread to make a it global or for a particular group. This way it’s accessed via the main thread page but on select members can see it. With this kind of labelling it would also be possible to show only threads for a given group.
A similarly an ignore button could be handy.
I’m for the like post buttons also.
A (weekly -optional length) email detailing posts made on your thread or post so that if the discussion is taking place over a long time you are always notified without scrawingly though evey tiem to see if they have actually responded.
My vote goes for MYBB. It is free and easy to set up and you could probably import all the posts from this forum in to it, if desired. It also has good spam defenses and loads of addons and other features if required.
if you don’t mind paying then the choice would be vbulletin
I like this forum as it is. But features that i do use on other forums, checking a list of my own posts. Quote button and easier video embed.
Also one thing with this forum is that there is no spell check unless i go to source and sometimes it can lose my cursor and i have to click and when i do ctrl+left or right it does not move and it can get frustating, especially on the popup reply box. Although that box is kind of nice, I don’t use it for long replies because of the risk of losing my reply and no spell check.
But by modifying the CSS of these prebuilt forums you could make it look like this forum fairly easily. Ie you could make it not look like the standard forum layout.
I never saw that spell check and it works quite well. I have enabled it. thanks. I had mentioned spell check before but no one mentioned that button. Hidden in plain site.
I meant these forums don’t work on mobile. I’m at a computer now, but I posted the above on mobile. I can’t figure out how to do paragraphs, quote, or activate links on my phone (Samsung GSII).
That with thicker borders and bolder colors to better offset individual posts, the ability to embed media, and clear boxing around quotes would be my ideal forum design, along with a few other aesthetic touches.
Does that bolding help?
I’m saying that, in high-volume threads, a few sub-discussions may start but they often get lost in the cacophony before they can blossom. One discussant goes away for a half a day and returns to find two new pages of unrelated arguments to wade through, with one or two relevant posts buried in there somewhere.
Even if the debaters themselves are determined to sort through the noise, their readership may not be. If there are four separate debates happening and you want to read them all, you have to either skip around visually to read one debate at a time, remembering which posts you skipped over, or you have to read everything in order - a few posts of this debate, a post from that debate, a few posts from another, another post from the original debate, etc. and juggle it all in your memory.
For more elaboration, I agree with almost everything dandv said in Think Blue’s link above, especially this.
To be honest, and it may be just me, but I don’t see much difference between LessWrong’s comment format and posts in a similarly-colored phpBB forum.
StackOverflow is one of my favorite forum-like sites in terms of appearance, but I think that has largely to do with how dynamic the web interaction is.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think one of the problems with “post trees” is that they can become too deeply nested - especially if any response to a post is nested at an inner level. The alternative would be to somehow choose when to branch a sub-discussion off into its own thread, which can already be done with more traditional forum software IIRC.
I guess the best of both worlds would be to have a flat view with a small clickable “map” of the thread structure up in the corner, with little +/- buttons you could click on to collapse any branch of the thread, which would make all those posts disappear from the flat view. If there is a flame war, troll feeding frenzy, or just some tangent you’re not interested in, you can just collapse it out of view, even if it is totally mixed in with the rest of the thread.
The link Think Blue posted discusses some ways around the “too deeply nested” issue. I haven’t found it to be a problem myself, however it’s handled.
This is classic. “I am unbiased and only looking out for those poor users, but my opponents are a all techno-religious zealots.” He should be a politician.
Anyway, I don’t think Reddit is a good forum replacement. That format seems to encourage a different form of communication than you see in forums, as John James mentioned. Plus, you might as well install a low grade WordPress plugin that mods posts/comments to look vaguely forum-ish. I’m also not a fan of tree threads…most of the time. They don’t bother me when there’s a lot of noise I don’t care about - for example, if I came to a site because of a google link for a product review. When I actually have interest in the subject I find them difficult. It’s really a personal preference thing. An option for users to select their view would be nice, but the tree view guys tend to get screwed because us flat view folks never reply to the right post because it doesn’t matter to us.
Something else I’d like to add: much of dandv’s argument in favor of nested posts (he calls this “threading”) rests on posts becoming shorter and shorter. I think that, with a community like this one, many posts can be rather lengthy - especially when they quote other posts. So I don’t think that this kind of forum/post organization would be conducive here.
It seems that all the common forum softwares simply do not allow tree-threading, so we may have to do without it in any case - unless the devs can handle working with the reddit code.
That said, dandv makes a lot of excellent points about forum design. He’s clearly done a lot of thinking on this issue.
Finally, this threaded vs. non-threaded issue seems very polarized. Many people vastly prefer one to the other and can’t imagine why anyone would like the other. To me, non-threaded forums for large groups are idealized for people uninterested in serious discourse. They make it totally unworkable for most people to follow multiple debates that may start to naturally unfold of a single topic, and they let people get away with the oh-so-familiar practices of cherry picking, preponderance-of-garbage tactics, and other ways to distract people for long enough that their argumentative failings and dodges slip down into the memory hole. Even if the more careful discussants can keep track, the gallery often doesn’t.
ETA: I’d think a familiar experience to any veteran of this forum is that threads tend to devolve into a cacophony after 2-3 pages. In contrast, note how this 300+ comment LessWrong post keeps everything very easily visually organized, and only brushes lightly into the indenting issue once (you have to click once to see the last two posts in the mini-debate).
If the developers end up going with Reddit, I will be motivated to set up my own “competing” forum. I might even use that as an opportunity to develop my own forum software package.
I’m very opposed to Reddit-proper as well. It would have to be modified even more radically than its LessWrong implementation to work here. I’m imagining it looking basically like this forum, but with indenting.
If we have to do a flat-view, I think phpBB looks pretty decent format-wise, if the posts could be offset more clearly and the aesthetics made more like this forum. I like how the quoting is done with different background colors that change with the level of quote nesting.
Another contention I have with nested posting - I’m sure others have brought this up many times before - is that I tend to look for new posts in threads. If the posts aren’t listed in chronological order, but are organized based on who responded to whom, I think I’d have a much harder time finding out which posts are new (i.e. they were written since the last time I viewed the thread) and which ones aren’t.
