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All the "forum" software that I have seen (opposed to more "ephemeral discussion" software like HN/Slashdot/Reddit) provides such a goddamn awful reading/browsi

by jlgreco 13y ago

All the "forum" software that I have seen (opposed to more "ephemeral discussion" software like HN/Slashdot/Reddit) provides such a goddamn awful reading/browsing/discoverability experience that any benefits it may have over mailing lists are completely lost. Just for starters, mailing lists allow the discussion to thread (as do sites like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit) and don't force you to use a shoddy web interface that shows you only a few dozen posts on a single page. If I have to scroll to the bottom of a page and click a link that says "513", I am having a bad day. I have never seen a large open-source project that uses "forums" in a way that doesn't impose massive overhead. Without fail, forums for open source projects are dreadful while mailing lists are, with a few notable exceptions, pleasant. When I am looking for information about a project and discover that all the project officially has is a forum, my heart sinks; it ranks up there with finding out the project is still hosted on sourceforge or a mega/rapidshare/whatever clone.

shabble 13y ago
Every time I'm forced to use a forum for something, I wish usenet hadn't succumbed to spam & binary warez. Many of the clients from 20 years ago have more (useful) features than modern forums. It's probably about time to reinvent it again, tunneled over Websockets with a Flat Responsive html5 Retina-Aware Interhyperface or something.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  I've always wanted to see a nested-discussion system with upvotes/downvotes that does the kind of seamless no-F5 updating you see on facebook.
  - jdjb 13y ago
    Wouldn't that mean that as you're reading a comment it could suddenly start moving up or down the screen? That'd make it pretty hard to read the stuff tailored for shills/fanboys/antifanboys...oh you may be onto something..
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Any reinvented Usenet should be client agnostic, otherwise it is just going to eventually succumb to the same problems that we already have with web forums.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    In which case it will eventually succumb to the problem of RSS - the biggest client will decide to drop it in favor of moving to a proprietary system.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      (Well I suppose that is what you get for using a webclient that you are not paying for....) What is the alternative here though? Instead of making it client agnostic, make it not client agnostic? How does that not make the situation even worse? Being client agnostic means that it doesn't matter if one particular client is discontinued. That is practically the entire point of being client agnostic... Any solution that will be viable in the long-term needs to be decentralized and client agnostic. Otherwise you are not reinventing Usenet, you are just reinventing web forums poorly. Edit: Aaaah, I need more sleep.
    - Pxtl 13y ago
      @jlgreco I was actually just griping.
Pxtl 13y ago
I honestly don't understand why everybody uses phpBB. The OSS project that I was thinking of when I made this post (zero-k.info, a small FOSS rts) rolled their own for just the reasons you described - it's primitive in some ways but at least it doesn't page.
tzs 13y ago
I'm not all that happy with mailing lists. Mail clients generally think of a "thread" as a list, which works OK for a back and forth discussion between two people, or for a discussion among a small group of people that are focused on a narrow problem. For a thread that gets big (in participants or in scope), that tends to suck. A tree is a better representation. A second problem with mailing lists is that unless you keep old messages, you generally have to go to some horrible web-based archive. Why not use an NNTP server? Newsreaders are great at handling threads, whether they are simple linear threads like those suited for email, or massive trees with dozens of participants and many side discussions.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Trees is indeed what I mean by "threads". Email naturally does it, though perhaps some clients have poor support for displaying it nicely. The linear "list" view of "threads" is what forums call "threads" and is exactly what I do not like. Those web-based mailing list archives, while usually unstyled and therefore "ugly", are well-indexed by search engines, easy to navigate, fast, and uncluttered. They are not perfect, but they offer a much better browsing/reading experience than standard web forums. Going back to NNTP would be idea. I don't know how we actually do that en-masse though.
- jswank 13y ago
  Gmane has NNTP feeds for all their mail list archives: http://gmane.org/features.php http://gmane.org/features.php
erlend_sh 13y ago
I like the Discourse approach. http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/ Instead of nested replies, it encourages "Creating new threads linking back to a post", which I find to be way more orderly than "conversation trees". They're also aiming for feature-parity with mailing lists, allowing people to participate effectively with threads by e-mail alone.

by jlgreco 13y ago

shabble 13y ago

Every time I'm forced to use a forum for something, I wish usenet hadn't succumbed to spam & binary warez. Many of the clients from 20 years ago have more (useful) features than modern forums. It's probably about time to reinvent it again, tunneled over Websockets with a Flat Responsive html5 Retina-Aware Interhyperface or something.

Pxtl 13y ago
I've always wanted to see a nested-discussion system with upvotes/downvotes that does the kind of seamless no-F5 updating you see on facebook.
- jdjb 13y ago
  Wouldn't that mean that as you're reading a comment it could suddenly start moving up or down the screen? That'd make it pretty hard to read the stuff tailored for shills/fanboys/antifanboys...oh you may be onto something..
jlgreco 13y ago
Any reinvented Usenet should be client agnostic, otherwise it is just going to eventually succumb to the same problems that we already have with web forums.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  In which case it will eventually succumb to the problem of RSS - the biggest client will decide to drop it in favor of moving to a proprietary system.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    (Well I suppose that is what you get for using a webclient that you are not paying for....) What is the alternative here though? Instead of making it client agnostic, make it not client agnostic? How does that not make the situation even worse? Being client agnostic means that it doesn't matter if one particular client is discontinued. That is practically the entire point of being client agnostic... Any solution that will be viable in the long-term needs to be decentralized and client agnostic. Otherwise you are not reinventing Usenet, you are just reinventing web forums poorly. Edit: Aaaah, I need more sleep.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    @jlgreco I was actually just griping.

Pxtl 13y ago

I honestly don't understand why everybody uses phpBB. The OSS project that I was thinking of when I made this post (zero-k.info, a small FOSS rts) rolled their own for just the reasons you described - it's primitive in some ways but at least it doesn't page.

tzs 13y ago

I'm not all that happy with mailing lists. Mail clients generally think of a "thread" as a list, which works OK for a back and forth discussion between two people, or for a discussion among a small group of people that are focused on a narrow problem. For a thread that gets big (in participants or in scope), that tends to suck. A tree is a better representation. A second problem with mailing lists is that unless you keep old messages, you generally have to go to some horrible web-based archive. Why not use an NNTP server? Newsreaders are great at handling threads, whether they are simple linear threads like those suited for email, or massive trees with dozens of participants and many side discussions.

jlgreco 13y ago
Trees is indeed what I mean by "threads". Email naturally does it, though perhaps some clients have poor support for displaying it nicely. The linear "list" view of "threads" is what forums call "threads" and is exactly what I do not like. Those web-based mailing list archives, while usually unstyled and therefore "ugly", are well-indexed by search engines, easy to navigate, fast, and uncluttered. They are not perfect, but they offer a much better browsing/reading experience than standard web forums. Going back to NNTP would be idea. I don't know how we actually do that en-masse though.
jswank 13y ago
Gmane has NNTP feeds for all their mail list archives: http://gmane.org/features.php http://gmane.org/features.php

erlend_sh 13y ago

I like the Discourse approach. http://www.discourse.org/ http://www.discourse.org/ Instead of nested replies, it encourages "Creating new threads linking back to a post", which I find to be way more orderly than "conversation trees". They're also aiming for feature-parity with mailing lists, allowing people to participate effectively with threads by e-mail alone.