Discourse

[Jason]

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.

Nah, he actually has a point.

The signal-to-noise ratio in the XenPorta thread isn't that great. There is a lot of noise that interferes with the signal. Flat forums can't achieve depth of discussion. That's why staying on topic is important, because all the conversations happening in a thread are thrown together. There is no flow. You have people responding to each other and people responding to the OP -- all jarbled together. You can see that in the XenPorta thread.

Flat forums are worse than nested forums for in-depth discussion. Nesting is both good and bad, though. But conversations are inherently nested anyway. In real life you probably rarely have discussions with more than ten people at a time. Even when you do it's frustrating as you have to switch between topics instead of following "threads" of the conversation -- and inevitably someone doesn't shut up and derails the conversation altogether.

Discourse seems to solve the problem in a fairly elegant way. Each topic is about a single topic. The conversation flows as a series of replies, ordered chronologically. But let's say Digital Doctor would like to change the topic, there's the "reply as new topic" button to the right of each post. He can then create a new thread with his new topic. Metadata about this forked topic is saved, so readers who happen to stumble upon it in the future can easily bounce between related threads. It's frictionless, and keeps every message in sequence. Their approach is essentially the twitter model with tweaks -- the simplicity of flat for reading, but limited expansions on demand for context. If anything, it improves the signal-to-noise ratio by incrementally improving the archaic quoting mechanism forums have been stuck with for a over decade.

 

[MagnusB]

How do you expect your average user would understand such a system? How do you get your users to fork the thread on the appropriate position? I have often caught my self in looking at stuff and thinking that is neat and useful, then added it to my site, and no one used it, even though I tried to push the use. But when I dumbed things down, I got high success rate. In all honesty, I think the KISS approach (Keep It Simple Stupid) is what people will respond best to. The easier it is from then to create a new topic, reply to a thread, the higher the likelihood is for them actually doing it. Also, my core point is that the platform is somewhat irrelevant regarding the quality of the content, in my experience, people are more motivated by other humans rather than the software you are running. An excellent example would be to post in a gaming forum with a username that makes it look like you are female.

When it comes to large threads, people will always struggle, even if there is only one topic discussed in the topic. The problem isn't that there is too much unrelated discussion going on, the core problem is that people are lazy, they are not willing to read through a 250+ pages thread to see if whatever they are looking for is in it. I would rather see excellent search result, ala Google.

 

[Kim]

Discourse always seems like a rude word to me


About the App...
I can't see anything instantly appealing or grabbing me.. and has been said, too complicated, might work for a tech site, can't see it working for most hobby specialist sites myself.

 

[HWS]

"reply as new topic" button to the right of each post.

I'll ask our coders to create such an add-on for XenForo. This is such a good idea and may stop the awful off-topic posts in threads.

 

[Jason]

How do you expect your average user would understand such a system? How do you get your users to fork the thread on the appropriate position? I have often caught my self in looking at stuff and thinking that is neat and useful, then added it to my site, and no one used it, even though I tried to push the use. But when I dumbed things down, I got high success rate.

They already understand the system, it's essentially how Twitter works. Anyone who has posted on a site like Reddit, or a blog that uses Disqus, has also ran into threading. I don't think you're giving the average user enough credit here. We interact online far more heavily than we did ten years ago.

As to the question when to fork, well that would depend on the community. Forums already have a lot of unwritten guidelines its members follow, and some are more tolerant of off topic posts than others.

In all honesty, I think the KISS approach (Keep It Simple Stupid) is what people will respond best to. The easier it is from then to create a new topic, reply to a thread, the higher the likelihood is for them actually doing it. Also, my core point is that the platform is somewhat irrelevant regarding the quality of the content, in my experience, people are more motivated by other humans rather than the software you are running. An excellent example would be to post in a gaming forum with a username that makes it look like you are female.

The platform can facilitate discussion or hamper it. Flat forums are not particularly great at in-depth discussions, they hamper it. The "reply as new topic" feature in Discourse is really just an incremental improvement on the poor quoting mechanism forums have been stuck with.

When it comes to large threads, people will always struggle, even if there is only one topic discussed in the topic. The problem isn't that there is too much unrelated discussion going on, the core problem is that people are lazy, they are not willing to read through a 250+ pages thread to see if whatever they are looking for is in it. I would rather see excellent search result, ala Google.

People struggle with large threads on forums because the underlying software makes it extremely difficult to parse the content within them. Everything is jarbled together. It's not the user's fault, the forum software isn't doing them any favors. I shouldn't have to read through 250+ pages to get the information I need, especially when half of the replies are not all that relevant to the topic -- they're back and forth discussions between two or three individuals (kind of like what we're doing right now -- a prime example of a discussion that can be nested). That's not being lazy, that's wanting to be productive with my time.

That also brings up another feature Discourse has, "best of view" for large threads, which could also help with this very problem.

 

[Slavik]

Apart from the few gimmiks it has, I simply think discourse is "comment software" and not "forum software".

 

[Jason]

Apart from the few gimmiks it has, I simply think discourse is "comment software" and not "forum software".

That seems a bit disingenuous. I could just as easily say forum software is essentially comment software on steroids. Discourse is a discussion platform (like XenForo) that uses a hybrid approach (cross between flat and threaded) to organize messages vs. the flat approach used by "traditional forums".

 

[Digital Doctor]

I shouldn't have to read through 250+ pages to get the information I need

Exactly.
99.9% of people don't anyway.
They just ask the questions about the information they can't find ... the thread gets longer (not better).

I'll ask our coders to create such an add-on for XenForo. This is such a good idea and may stop the awful off-topic posts in threads.

Probably not

Do you think Comments in Posts might work ? (Keep the small chit chat comments inside a post vs spread to the whole thread)

 

[Digital Doctor]

threaded discussion vs flat in "traditional forums".

vB3 you could toggle threaded vs flat, I believe. I don't think many people like the threaded.

 

[Slavik]

That seems a bit disingenuous. I could just as easily say forum software is essentially comment software on steroids. Discourse is a discussion platform (like XenForo) that uses a threaded approach to organize messages vs. the flat approach used by "traditional" forums.

I looked at it in some depth. And thought, how could I ever see my community running this software.

The answer was, I couldn't. It simply seems geared to be "comment software" by design rather than trying to build a community structure.

If this software was released by anyone but SO, I would bet money it would fail. The only reason it may gain any traction is because of who is behind it. And even then, I don't ever see it taking off as a major contender in the forum market.

Give it 18-24 months, I bet discourse will be forgotten by most.

 

[Jason]

vB3 you could toggle threaded vs flat, I believe. I don't think many people like the threaded.

I didn't much care for vBulletin's threaded implementation either, tbh. I think a hybrid approach would be more successful.

 

[Luke F]

vB3 you could toggle threaded vs flat, I believe. I don't think many people like the threaded.

Because it was implemented really badly

 

[Jason]

I looked at it in some depth. And thought, how could I ever see my community running this software.

The answer was, I couldn't. It simply seems geared to be "comment software" by design rather than trying to build a community structure.

If this software was released by anyone but SO, I would bet money it would fail. The only reason it may gain any traction is because of who is behind it. And even then, I don't ever see it taking off as a major contender in the forum market.

Give it 18-24 months, I bet discourse will be forgotten by most.

Community structure? I don't think traditional forum software gives a sense of community. I think a sense of community makes people willing to put up with the software being used.

Where I work, we've started to replace traditional forums for a lot of our internal discussions, though mostly with Google+ communities (well, an internal version of it), but also, for some teams, with a system quite similar to the approach Discourse has taken. It's still in its early stages, but on the surface the quality of discussions being held seemed to have improved. So, I definitely think there is some merit to the hybrid approach to flat vs. threaded forums. I don't think Discourse has quite nailed it yet, but I do find their work promising. The forum market is ripe for disruption on the same scale Wordpress disrupted the CMS market. If they keep iterating, they could gain traction.

 

[whynot]

The only reason it may gain any traction is because of who is behind it.

100% true.

 

[havanaclub]

If this software was released by anyone but SO, I would bet money it would fail. The only reason it may gain any traction is because of who is behind it. And even then, I don't ever see it taking off as a major contender in the forum market.

Give it 18-24 months, I bet discourse will be forgotten by most.

Just like XenForo?
(They have IMO a much bigger WHO's Behind factor then xenforo, which will give them gave them already much more attraction)
I've read the first time about it, as an 16 year old frontend guy retweetet an post from john resig about discuss https://twitter.com/jeresig/status/298931187089547264
That's IMO real viral marketing

If they keep iterating, they could gain traction.

100% agree.
They have already everything important:

REST Access
And many things i wanted to have in forums
I think it's time to start with ruby, this seems the perfect software for me
The only problem is the editor.
Jeff as a supporter of markdown ( http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/05/is-html-a-humane-markup-language.html ) included this instead of bb


IMO everybody can gain traction in this business ATM, that's why we're seeing so many new projects being presented
vB4=> dead
vB5 => joke
xf => say whatever you want, for me it's dead
ipb => enjoy the roll as market leader, but many people don't like IPB or they're waiting for their next major release

 

[Slavik]

willing to put up with the software being used.

Id rather my community want to use the software provided, not "put up with it"

 

[Ingenious]

Personally, I like it but I know others will hate it. The clean interface without lots of 'noise' around the conversations is refreshing.

Thoughts?

Thanks ENF, I'd never heard of this platform before. I like it! My first impressions are similar to Xenforo when I first came across that too, not in terms of style and features but rather the emphasis on content and what people are saying, rather than lots of bloat. The only thing I'm not keen on is the speed, seeing "Loading..." on almost every page view (even when going "back" in the browser to the previous page) makes navigation a little tedious as it is in vB5 for the same reasons.

I agree with comments above that making forums easy for laypeople to share content has to be the main aim these days. People just want to easily share words, images and video - whatever platform makes that easy and intuitive will always be the winner.

 

[havanaclub]

I'll ask our coders to create such an add-on for XenForo. This is such a good idea and may stop the awful off-topic posts in threads.

Agree.
If it's implemented the right way, it would be really a nice and useful addon!

If they have no time, i'm having time^^

 

[HWS]

If they have no time, i'm having time^^

Sure. And you already have a lot of code for it you could reuse.

PM?

 

[Digital Doctor]

I'll ask our coders to create such an add-on for XenForo. This is such a good idea and may stop the awful off-topic posts in threads.

Ragtek's addon might help start this off ..

http://xenforo.com/community/threads/ragtek-quote-post-conversation.17892/