Discourse

Likewise. Unsurprisingly it seems to be taking a stackoverflow/exchange approach to community management, which scales and can be quite effective. The infinite scrolling (and use of HTML5 replacestate so fwd/back navigation doesn't completely break), read while replying and "best of" view stuff is nifty as well.

My only beef, is the backend is a rails app -- I would have preferred a Python implementation, but meh :)
 
A few nice features but probably worsens not solves many of the things that make forums less relevant going forward.


I like this ..
paste.to.share.images.webp


Forums need to enable a community to create CONTENT. Good Content. That can be kept up to date by the community. In 2013, forums just encourage back and forth banter which often isn't good content. To impress guests and search engines .... excellent content must be created and easily found.

A great example of poor content presentation and organization is the XenPorta thread, or XenPorta content on Xenforo.com as a whole. Zero organization. Someone starting XenPorta today is not at an advantage despite years of XenPorta content. Zero structure = Zero organization = mess = guests don't like = No Google love = fail.
 
You are using conflicting logic, for example the Xenporta thread is a highly successful thread, therefor it is not good. As for organization, nothing will change that on successful threads, even with infinite scrolling, it is still a wall of text that needs to be read, which is more often than not the barrier of most users when it comes to finding stuff.


To impress guests and search engines .... excellent content must be created and easily found.
Software does not create the content, administrators have a responsibility here to engage users to create good content, either via having an engaging topic, or kickstarting activity via controversy or whatever. How you choose to organize your content can differ, but xF does a pretty good job of making the content accessible for search engines. Also proper use of thread prefix, categories and subforums will make your content more easy to find.


In 2013, forums just encourage back and forth banter which often isn't good content.
Forums, also called discussion boards, are meant for that sort of behavior, its called a discussion. Whether or not there is an interest for that is kind of irrelevant, cause you are saying that forums needs to be something else in order to succeed, which just isn't the case. Maybe you are just looking for something else other than a forum.
 
A member just posted about this the other day on my site, I'm going to try and make some time these evening to check it out.

I like competition (y)
 
Has some nice features like endless scrolling within threads and replying while reading but don't like the layout and don't see how this will help keep forums relevant apart from switching to javascript.
 
I like the idea, but I'm not a massive fan of the current implementation. There are way too many clickable elements on screen for a supposedly "simplified" system and I just generally don't think too much of the layout of elements. There's also a bug I've noticed on their demo and meta forums where users with long usernames don't have their usernames wrap - they're simply hidden by the post body.
 
Back
Top Bottom