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About a year ago, Jeff Atwood came to the Something Awful forums to discuss ideas for better forum software. Unfortunately, it seemed like he had already made
by YokoZar 14y ago
About a year ago, Jeff Atwood came to the Something Awful forums to discuss ideas for better forum software. Unfortunately, it seemed like he had already made up his mind on the design, blithely dismissing well-articulated arguments against things like gamification and having non-moderated hiding of posts.
As much as I like stack overflow, I don't have high hopes for this project. I fully expect it to be even more full of the terrible metadiscussion about mod points, tags, visibility, and so on that seem to corrupt half the posts on places that implement similar systems.
- EvilTrout 14y agoI think you might be surprised if you check out what we came up with. You're right that in the beginning Jeff was interested in gamification, but when we sat down and started to crack at it, we found the interface itself was in need of the most work. You can like posts in this release, but it's mainly to prevent useless "me too" posts. Users don't have scores. Posts do, but that's just so we can calculate a summary view for mega threads. Additionally, almost everything is configurable. We give what we consider sensible defaults out of the box, but you can disable/tune a lot right now. We also integrated features suggested by goons like a global API. I've been a SA goon for almost a decade. I really want to make this software good. Actually I'll probably post a follow up topic there soon!