6 ms·

Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to be refere

Doing everything in chat is pure insanity. It's great for the day-to-day collaborating on projects... but it's all short-term memory. Are you going to be referencing a chat from 3 years ago? We use an internal forum in addition to chat. Anything substantive goes in the forum. We'll regularly reference 5 year old posts.

john_oshea 8y ago
Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)
- snazz 8y ago
  Discourse?
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    +1 for Discourse. It’s miles ahead of anything else.
  - LaGrange 8y ago
    Second that. Discourse is fantastic, using other forum software feels terrible after it.
- lvh 8y ago
  Fossil is a source control system that has, among other things, a builtin forum. I'm convinced that tight integration between source control, issue trackers, wiki pages, and forums is a good thing. Generally you can use URLs, but that's often cumbersome.
- gilbetron 8y ago
  Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try. I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    We tried to move from vBulletin over to Discourse but it didn't work out; in comparison, Discourse is very complicated and heavy weight. I want to like it, but it's just as snappy. Instead, we went for XenForo, made by the original vB developers. It's got just enough modern technology to make it a bit more pleasant, and it's super fast (faster than vB 3). Migrating vB to that was easy enough too (took a while, but faster than Discourse which needed three days for the basic import and then still had a million tasks to run in the background)
  - ecto 8y ago
    We're working on something like subreddits - but just for your community - at https://threadbase.io https://threadbase.io
  - dsr_ 8y ago
    Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet. Proper threading. Read/Unread tracking. Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.) Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.) Killfiles. They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google. These are off the top of my head.
    - tomp 8y ago
      Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.
      - howard941 8y ago
        Sorry, no native point system. You can bolt on something NoCeM-like, server or newsreader based, and enjoy distributing article reputation right now. But it supplies only a show/no show signal out of the box. I think the cancelmoose would have preferred it to be somehow more nuanced and only live in newsreaders... http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/ http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/ https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-nocem/ https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-nocem/ https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose
- markdoubleyou 8y ago
  My company just started using XenForo, and we've been pretty happy with it. We're self-hosting on a cheap AWS Lightsail instance. We really wanted to to like Dicourse, but everyone on my team found some little thing that really annoyed them ("why does it hijack ctrl-f?", etc.). It was death by a thousand cuts. XenForo is the most modern of the traditional forum platforms that I reviewed. Everyone just gets it.
- Cogito 8y ago
  Depending on what exactly you are trying to do, I've found wikis like Confluence pretty good for quite a few things. It used to have a halfway decent forum addon, and the ability to have the wiki features/content embedded was enough to convince us not to try and use a separate forum.
VectorLock 8y ago
If you can reference 5 year old forum posts why can't you reference 3 year old chat conversations?
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  Structured threads vs an unending ticker tape of noise.
  - diminoten 8y ago
    Why can't you have threads in a chat app? This article is really, "We couldn't adapt our processes to Slack, so we blamed the tool and replaced a chat app with processes, because we're special snowflakes and how could anything Not Invented Here apply to our totally unique problems of communication?" Sure, they ended up with a series of other tools to cover their workflows, the thing they "invented" was how those tools work together to cover the gaps created by not actually having a comprehensive and well-configured chat app.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      You can, but it's not the default; you need discipline and moderators to force people to thread conversations and structure their thread starters in such a way as to optimize for searching. IMO just use forum software if you're going that way. Much more low volume, too (generally).
      - diminoten 8y ago
        You don't need moderators, just policy. Where I work we have threaded conversations and no one needs to moderate anything. Further, "optimize for searching" isn't a thing. Teams gives full text search, and you can find any word or phrase you need to instantly. I think you're optimizing for familiarity.
    - ivanfon 8y ago
      Zulip has topics and it's absolutely amazing, but I still don't think it helps reference years old messages.

john_oshea 8y ago

Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)

snazz 8y ago
Discourse?
- alkonaut 8y ago
  +1 for Discourse. It’s miles ahead of anything else.
- LaGrange 8y ago
  Second that. Discourse is fantastic, using other forum software feels terrible after it.
lvh 8y ago
Fossil is a source control system that has, among other things, a builtin forum. I'm convinced that tight integration between source control, issue trackers, wiki pages, and forums is a good thing. Generally you can use URLs, but that's often cumbersome.
gilbetron 8y ago
Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try. I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  We tried to move from vBulletin over to Discourse but it didn't work out; in comparison, Discourse is very complicated and heavy weight. I want to like it, but it's just as snappy. Instead, we went for XenForo, made by the original vB developers. It's got just enough modern technology to make it a bit more pleasant, and it's super fast (faster than vB 3). Migrating vB to that was easy enough too (took a while, but faster than Discourse which needed three days for the basic import and then still had a million tasks to run in the background)
- ecto 8y ago
  We're working on something like subreddits - but just for your community - at https://threadbase.io https://threadbase.io
- dsr_ 8y ago
  Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet. Proper threading. Read/Unread tracking. Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.) Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.) Killfiles. They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google. These are off the top of my head.
  - tomp 8y ago
    Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.
    - howard941 8y ago
      Sorry, no native point system. You can bolt on something NoCeM-like, server or newsreader based, and enjoy distributing article reputation right now. But it supplies only a show/no show signal out of the box. I think the cancelmoose would have preferred it to be somehow more nuanced and only live in newsreaders... http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/ http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/ https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-nocem/ https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-nocem/ https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose
markdoubleyou 8y ago
My company just started using XenForo, and we've been pretty happy with it. We're self-hosting on a cheap AWS Lightsail instance. We really wanted to to like Dicourse, but everyone on my team found some little thing that really annoyed them ("why does it hijack ctrl-f?", etc.). It was death by a thousand cuts. XenForo is the most modern of the traditional forum platforms that I reviewed. Everyone just gets it.
Cogito 8y ago
Depending on what exactly you are trying to do, I've found wikis like Confluence pretty good for quite a few things. It used to have a halfway decent forum addon, and the ability to have the wiki features/content embedded was enough to convince us not to try and use a separate forum.

VectorLock 8y ago

If you can reference 5 year old forum posts why can't you reference 3 year old chat conversations?

amiga-workbench 8y ago
Structured threads vs an unending ticker tape of noise.
- diminoten 8y ago
  Why can't you have threads in a chat app? This article is really, "We couldn't adapt our processes to Slack, so we blamed the tool and replaced a chat app with processes, because we're special snowflakes and how could anything Not Invented Here apply to our totally unique problems of communication?" Sure, they ended up with a series of other tools to cover their workflows, the thing they "invented" was how those tools work together to cover the gaps created by not actually having a comprehensive and well-configured chat app.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    You can, but it's not the default; you need discipline and moderators to force people to thread conversations and structure their thread starters in such a way as to optimize for searching. IMO just use forum software if you're going that way. Much more low volume, too (generally).
    - diminoten 8y ago
      You don't need moderators, just policy. Where I work we have threaded conversations and no one needs to moderate anything. Further, "optimize for searching" isn't a thing. Teams gives full text search, and you can find any word or phrase you need to instantly. I think you're optimizing for familiarity.
  - ivanfon 8y ago
    Zulip has topics and it's absolutely amazing, but I still don't think it helps reference years old messages.