Flarum - forums reimagined?

[AlexT]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1221714515/flarum-forums-reimagined

Not convinced I would replace my favorite forum software with it (if the project is ever realized), but perhaps it has a good idea or two.

 

[turtile]

I like the user interface. It's really easy for anyone to pick up - I hate the "post new thread" button since in confusing 90% of people!

 

[Deathstarr]

I looked at it and while the idea is decent I wouldn't switch just because I can see that its limited in what it can do verse the mighty Xenforo. But I do wish them luck.

 

[Alpha1]

I am not seeing it, but I wish them success. community software indeed needs more innovation. anyone who ups the game is very welcome in my eyes.

 

[JABRONI]

Wow, that actually looks killer.

 

[dieketzer]

im not sure if this would be stand-alone, or instead be saas... saas really doesnt interest me, but a hybrid would be interesting (meaning sharing login credentials among all forums running that software).

 

[oman]

Interesting. Also Australian based which is nice to see. See if it gets enough funding.

 

[Lisa]

Doesn't look like anything special, very bland. Got bored about half way through the video to be honest.

 

[TheBigK]

I liked what I saw in their introduction video. I personally want XenForo to adopt a modern approach to forums.

 

[D.O.A.]

I don't see any innovative new revolutionary features, theme design and layout does not count.

Traditionally, forums are independent, isolated, and self-hosted. Users have to create a new account for every forum they want to participate in, and then check back for new activity on each one. And for admins, managing a server is the stuff of nightmares — as if managing a community isn’t already hard enough.

We’re bringing Flarum to the cloud. We’ll provide easy and affordable hosting so you can set up your forum in just a few clicks. You won’t have to worry about scary things like backups, updates, or traffic spikes. It’ll be the easiest and most powerful way to use Flarum for your community.

But... I like worrying about scary things like backups, updates, or traffic spikes. I don't like this single sign on stuff either, on any type of forum, so I'm not really sold from the spiel. I moved to xenforo because vbulletin 4, to me, was a broken wheel. Xenforo rebuilt the wheel again. This isn't even a circle yet, I'll come back in 2016.

 

[Lisa]

But... I like worrying about scary things like backups, updates, or traffic spikes. I don't like this single sign on stuff either, on any type of forum, so I'm not really sold from the spiel.

Same here. I'd be more worried at the fact it was in the cloud and away from my complete control.

 

[dieketzer]

Interesting. Also Australian based which is nice to see. See if it gets enough funding.

that completely escaped me until you mentioned it.

 

[RickM]

The video was full of complete lies.

The screenshots they showed seemed to be:

- vB5
- phpBB 3.x
- IPB Free / iPB 1.x (i.e at least ~6 year old discontinued software)

Forums are not "hard to host".
Forums are not "clunky", "cumbersome", "bloated", etc

It comes across a bit like that Ghost blog platform - all talk about how the existing options sucked and how their option was better. Practically a forum that looks like a tablet mail client is not at all going to work for a real forum. Try that sort of interface on something like digitalpoint and it'll fail miserably.

Also. Single sign-on? Wonderful...except what happens when their own hosting platform doesn't take off - do all those on the self-hosted version loose their user database?

 

[Jay]

"There's no really great software out there." Apparently they've never heard of XenForo.

 

[AlexT]

"There's no really great software out there." Apparently they've never heard of XenForo.

They came to realize that as well, and thus decided to kill the kickstarter project.

There are well-established modernplatforms out there, and it isn’t easy to justify $50K of pledges for yet another player.

 

[Renegade]

I don't see any innovative new revolutionary features, theme design and layout does not count.

Actually it counts a lot more than nothing, in fact in community software a lot more than features. A proper user experience design would be of much more value to the users than a list of features which no one can figure out how to use.

Users come to the forums to read about what they searched, ask their own questions and then looking at the useful activity decide to stay on and participate. Then they want some kind of visible recognition for their participation. A forum, even though it has all the features, by its design does not facilitate all that for a new user coz its not very intuitive:

1. Its not easy to figure out how to ask your own question if you land on a thread from search engine. Then you go to the home page and it gets even more confusing looking at the bunch of sections.
2. You cannot easily make out how active is the forum coz you don't know there is a whats new button which will show you all the latest activity. The huge list of forum section just switches you off anyway.
3. Then when you enter a section you cannot figure out easily which thread is of higher value than the others.
4. ... such and such

I guess these are probably some of the area where sites like stackexchange and quora are doing a much better job. Point is that we need to step away from the conventional UI and structure that we have been using for decades and think from the perspective of new users of the current information age.

 

[MISC]

I guess these are probably some of the area where sites like stackexchange and quora are doing a much better job. Point is that we need to step away from the conventional UI and structure that we have been using for decades and think from the perspective of new users of the current information age.

I absolutely support this!

 

[RickM]

I guess these are probably some of the area where sites like stackexchange and quora are doing a much better job. Point is that we need to step away from the conventional UI and structure that we have been using for decades and think from the perspective of new users of the current information age.

I read that as "We need to step away from the tried and tested, and most widely used UI on forum systems and switch to the one that has either killed communities that switched to it, or forced the community owners to make a u turn."

The vanilla/flarum style layout does not promote community. It promotes single responses.

The whole point of Stack Overflows design is the same - to get one question and one answer at the top of the screen, then all lesser answers out of the way.

That's not a community.

 

[Daniel Hood]

You could easily convert XenForo to have a front page similar to this. I don't really see anything special.

I also agree with:

The whole point of Stack Overflows design is the same - to get one question and one answer at the top of the screen, then all lesser answers out of the way.

That's not a community.

I do get the reasoning for having such an index though and a quick way to start a discussion.

 

[Dad.]

One of the main marvels here is the UI, and the fact that it was built in such a way that'll support touch, slide, etc. We've tried implementing features like this, but due to the infrastructure and conventions in the views, this is nearly impossible with XenForo.

That said, I am relying heavily that (and can only assume) this will be fixed in 2.0.