The forum life
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Great denizens of forums, I come seeking knowledge. All thoughts to the following questions are appreciated. Answers do not need to be specifically related to your experiences on this forum only.
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Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
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How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
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When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
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When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
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Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
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Do you care about the ability to create polls?
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Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Thanks in advance,
Arantor, developer of PetesBigEgo Software
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Great denizens of forums, I come seeking knowledge. All thoughts to the following questions are appreciated. Answers do not need to be specifically related to your experiences on this forum only.
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
Meh. It's probably better than pages, as long as it works. Seems more susceptible to jellypotato problems due to lazy loading of images & other resources without reserving proper space (especially on shaky mobile data connections, though mobile is obviously the form factor where infiniscroll really shines)
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Markdumb gets the job done for all my meming
- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
- Engagements with my existing posts
- Threads that I care about that have updates other than engagements.
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Net positive, as long as it doesn't break shit or eat my mobile data allotment alive.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Infinite scroll, yay/nay?
Nay. Nay, I say!
If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
I lose my place in an endless sea of posts. How many have I read, how many do I have left to read, how will I ever find my way back here again? More importantly, can I jump to the front for a second and jump back again?
It doesn't help that every infiniscroll implementation I've seen is trash and breaks on basic use-cases.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do?
Basically every day, but luckily the forum also accepts basic HTML.
Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
No.
When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
Mostly N/A, I don't frequent many fora.
Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
Sometimes. Usually if it's a thread I haven't seen before, and because then I'll try to get caught up on the thread, which is fine if it's short, but if it's a mega-topic I'll probably get a dozen or more posts in before realizing I've bitten off more than I can chew. Then I'll jump to the end and if the post isn't worth the effort I've just expended, I'm really irritated.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
Do you care about the ability to create polls?
No.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
As long as it doesn't interrupt me, they're good.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
I like it but it's probably best to make it optional.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Never. bbcode sucks. Obviously in either case having buttons for the most common things makes life easier.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
The topic/category list and the rules if there are any. I hate forums where you can't see anything until registered but this isn't really a criticism of any software but how the respective admins have configured it.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
edit: misread the question - recent posts and notifications for posts I've made (or flagged as watching or whatever).
@Arantor said in The forum life:
Does necroposting annoy you?
No.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
Do you care about the ability to create polls?
It's handy if it's there, but it's not a big deal if it's not.
@Arantor said in The forum life:
Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Good as long as it works.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Great denizens of forums, I come seeking knowledge.
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
Nay. Infiniscroll is evil. Even its inventor regrets it. It's designed specifically to trap user into endless quantity of poor-quality content.
There's a reason nobody writes novels on a toilet paper roll (even though many should, I digress).
Page as a logical unit helps to divide an arduous task, as it were, in smaller, manageable units, and to jump to specific points in a thread.
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Fuck no. BBCode is awful, verbose and difficult to type on mobile. Markdown is sufficient in most cases. The exact subset may depend on the type of the forum (e.g., some may need extended table syntax, others won't).
- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
- Unread posts
- Ego stroking (upboats and mentions)
- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
Here no, but otherwise, in serious threads, yes. I find it rarely adds useful information or asks a question relevant to the original post.
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
Not really, but it's one of the more useful tools to have. Unlike infiniscroll, I might add.
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Optional. Mobile data reasons.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Great denizens of forums
Oh, damn, I thought I’d add my thoughts but I now see this is not addressed to me :(
Well, too bad, here they are anyway …
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
I’m undecided. I like it for the ability to read threads without having to click to go to another page, but it makes it harder to jump to somewhere specific if you approximately know where you want to go. That is, with paged layout you can say “I think the thing I’m looking for was on page 3” but you can’t easily do that with infinite scroll. OTOH, since I don’t need to do that often, it’s not a big deal for me.
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Basically never. In fact I tend to have the opposite problem, in that I sometimes type Markdown by habit, and only then realise I’m on a forum that doesn’t support it. Sometimes only after posting.
- When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there
Usually by having stumbled across it somehow, like when searching for something that the forum’s intended subject matter is related to.
and what information do you want to see?
Stuff I’m interested in. Duh :)
- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
An overview of subforums or new messages. I kind of prefer a list of the subforums with indicators of which ones have new messages in them, as I like to scroll down past those and only open the ones I’m actually interested in (or suspect I am) rather than seeing all new messages since my last visit and having to wade through those.
- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
Not if it adds something interesting. People fbmacing an ancient thread to add something they could just have opened a new one for (like, say, a ten-year-old thread about a specific function in an app in order to ask something about that function that the thread didn’t cover) does annoy me a bit, though.
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
It can be useful, I guess, but I don’t use it much. Once every couple of years, I suppose, across all the forums I regularly visit?
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
I like it when notifications appear pretty much immediately, though doing that on page load rather than actively pushing them works for me too — it’s more the getting notifications that I find useful than that I get them the second they’re triggered.
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Infinite scroll,
yayaye/nay?Aye if it works well. Nay if it's a buggy mess. Over here, I use pages.
How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do?
1984 predicted everything. If you cannot express something in language you use, eventually you stop wanting to express it.
When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
Google search, and the thing I'm searching for.
When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
I only register if I want to post something, or if there's a restricted category I need to register to access. So the first thing I want is either the reply box, or the category I couldn't access.
Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
The discussion following necroing is almost always completely separate from the original conversation in the thread. So usually I'm either completely disinterested in the new posts even if the old ones interest me, or the other way around. I'd rather people keep it separate.
Do you care about the ability to create polls?
As much as I care about the ability to open context menu with keyboard. Which is virtually never, but when I need it I'm super pissed if I can't.
Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Doubleplus good. When I read all posts and I'm writing my reply, I want to know if more posts were made in the meantime.
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@izzion said in The forum life:
@Arantor said in The forum life:
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Net positive, as long as it doesn't break shit or eat my mobile data allotment alive.
Not under my mouse cursor. Never change anything under my mouse cursor (unless in response to something I did, duh)
Edit: I had notifications in mind when I wrote this. If you meant posts — and it sounds like you did — then yes, for the same reason @Gustav said above.
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@error said in The forum life:
I lose my place in an endless sea of posts. How many have I read, how many do I have left to read, how will I ever find my way back here again? More importantly, can I jump to the front for a second and jump back again?
Idea [cc @Arantor just in case]: per-user, per-thread bookmarks. Make them visible like those highlights in the scrollbar when doing a find in your browser:
Take it one step further by adding something like sausages for sub-topics in a thread, which might be crowd-sourced to the people in the discussion, or to mods (though that sounds like work). This (and the per-user bookmarks) can be added to that scrollbar-ish thing Discourse has:
This runs the risk of becoming extremely noisy, of course.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
Meh.
The main problem with it is that it's difficult to navigate. As long as you're only interested in the latest, or perhaps linearly reading from beginning to end, it kinda works (minus technical issues and jellypotato).
Quickly jumping/skimming through a thread is pretty terrible. If I'm slowly reading through an interesting thread, I basically can't skip ahead (e.g., check head of thread or a notification/mention or whatever), because it's largely impossible to find back to where I left off.
Infiniscroll seems to fuck up more often with search, e.g., search lands you on a post, and then infiniscroll jellypotatoes you away and you have no idea wtf is going on.
How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Markdown is OK. I remember the most important formatting, so I don't have to interact with stupid UIs. Fallback to some HTML (as somebody mentioned) is useful. I don't miss bbcode.
When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
An overview of the forum and content within easy reach. That can be either an overview of categories or just threads. I'd probably prefer the former. No stupid filler or landing pages.
Mostly, I seem to land on forums via search, so that would be in the middle of a thread.
Avoid stupid popups/-overs. No, I don't care about your onboarding at that point and you don't need to inform me that I'm a new user.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Great denizens of forums, I come seeking knowledge. All thoughts to the following questions are appreciated. Answers do not need to be specifically related to your experiences on this forum only.
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
Meh. I have it on but I don't particularly care one way or another. It's probably just that I didn't know you can turn it off for a long time and I've gotten used to it.
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Never. Some things like spoilers are cumbersome but bbcode is much worse.
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When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
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When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
The preferences screen? Working search, that would be great.
- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
No, it's funny to see old shit from before my time.
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
No.
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Good.
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@Zecc said in The forum life:
can be added to that scrollbar-ish thing Discourse has
Good news for fans of NodeBB updates!
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
I don't mind it if it doesn't result in the page moving (except as scrolled by me). Jellypotato is max bad. Lacking infiniscroll is not a dealbreaker.
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Markdown (especially with special treatment of links on their own line, as we do here) is pretty good for most casual things. It's only when you get into doing tables that it gets nasty, and most forums don't need tables in their actual content most of the time.
If you're doing anything fancy, don't let content escape its bounding box and keep animation extremely limited. Do not
fa-spinall the things.- When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
Depends. Often I'm either looking for something specific (so it's a link via a search engine) or I'm looking to see what other people are saying about the general topic of the forum. Other cases are rare I guess.
- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
I like to get a summary of engagement with my posts. Am I contributing in ways that build things up, or am I just screaming into the void on my own?
- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
Not too much, providing it's on topic. I might laugh at it, but I won't get upset unless it's off topic (or spam or... you get the picture).
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
Not at all. I think polls tend to lack nuance, and I'm more interested in the long-tail of answers that I didn't think of, so a poll just doesn't capture it for me (outside of very specific setups, but then I'll use another site).
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Fine as long as they don't trigger jellypotato. Or maybe could have an indicator "this post has been edited since you started looking; press here to get the current version loaded". A bit of a spitball idea there.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Great denizens of forums, I come seeking knowledge. All thoughts to the following questions are appreciated. Answers do not need to be specifically related to your experiences on this forum only.
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
Nay, because of jellypotato, and also linking to a specific post often breaks in fun and magical ways. Also, forgetting position, and if you jump to an earlier post from a reply often you can't go back to where you were. All these work in paginated forums.
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
I can't say I ever need that, but I also don't write anything fancy.
- When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
I dunno? An easily findable account creation if I plan to become a member, other than that, an easily navigateable structure with sensible names.
- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
The forum still being there?
To me, there is no difference in returning or regular use.- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
No.
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
Not particularly, but it's a decent feature.
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Meh. Not like I care particularly.
Thanks in advance,
Arantor, developer of PetesBigEgo Software
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
Very strong nay, I can't stand it. Why:
- easy to get lost
- I never know how far till end/beginning of a thread I am
- no ability to jump long distances in non-retarded way
- chokes horribly on spotty connections
- history and links get broken all the time
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
I miss bbcode not because I can't express myself, but because makrdown is terrible.
- When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
I get there by accident, probably while searching for something unrelated.
I want to see clear and concise description of what this place is.- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
- General sub forum.
- List of specialized sub forums.
- Literally nothing else.
- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
No and I don't understand why it should.
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
No.
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Don't care. It will be a buggy and broken anyway.
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@MrL said in The forum life:
- I never know how far till end/beginning of a thread I am
- no ability to jump long distances in non-retarded way
Seeing a lot of this and I'm not sure what to make of it. Never seen this?
...and this?
I like this a lot better than the sorts of paginators you often see where you can jump to the next / previous few pages or the first / last without a way to select an arbitrary number.
If your life sucks so much that you mostly use mobile, then, yeah, I feel for you. For much more than this lack of UI.
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@boomzilla said in The forum life:
@MrL said in The forum life:
- I never know how far till end/beginning of a thread I am
- no ability to jump long distances in non-retarded way
Seeing a lot of this and I'm not sure what to make of it. Never seen this?
...and this?
I like this a lot better than the sorts of paginators you often see where you can jump to the next / previous few pages or the first / last without a way to select an arbitrary number.
If your life sucks so much that you mostly use mobile, then, yeah, I feel for you. For much more than this lack of UI.
I mean, the mobile UI has the exact same thing plus pretty color that shows your progress percent (though minus the ability to enter an arbitrary post number to go to, I guess?)
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@izzion said in The forum life:
though minus the ability to enter an arbitrary post number to go to
Yes.
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@HardwareGeek Who was it who used to have as her signature bragging that she brought down the forums with a fa-spin attack? @accalia ?
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@jinpa Maybe? I don't remember.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
Nay. I like pages that fully load in the background and don't randomly stop scrolling if there's an Internet blurp. I like having the browser's scrollbar work properly. I like being able to jump around longer threads easily.
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
They both cover the things I use the most: bold, italics, and linking. I'm not nearly as familiar with Markdown so I don't always remember its syntax (links, for example) or know what all it might be missing. (Spoilers?)
- When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
Searches for the first, answers to a specific question or talk about a specific topic for the second. I haven't joined a new forum for a while, though I have been lurking on a few. Too often people use Discord these days, which is opaque to searches and generally (new) user hostile.
- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
The topics or sections that have unread posts.
- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
Yes. Old posts may be no longer relevant and the people who posted in those threads may not follow the forum now. It's also annoying when robospam hits all the old threads in the forum.
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
No.
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
I prefer not; I want the page to load and then stop.
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INFINITE SCROLL IS DEATH.
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@Zenith said in The forum life:
INFINITE SCROLL IS DEATH.
The trick is to know when to stop scrolling and go to get something to eat and drink before you die of hunger or thirst.
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@Gurth Oh, not for me, but for anybody that implements it as the only option. I have a particular set of skills and I will find you.
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Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
Lets look at the opposite, locking threads after some dt: that can be bad on topics like SW help, because good advice on version n can be bad at version n+k.
In those types of forum/subforum threads should not be locked, at most throtle by asking n pointz to post there
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@cabrito When to lock a thread is probably left as a matter of discretion to the mods; scripting that sort of thing encourages abuse or angry users. OK, it doesn't stop a mod from being an asshole, but automatic timed thread closure doesn't either.
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@dkf said in The forum life:
@cabrito When to lock a thread is probably left as a matter of discretion to the mods; scripting that sort of thing encourages abuse or angry users. OK, it doesn't stop a mod from being an asshole, but automatic timed thread closure doesn't either.
Bump to keep this thread from auto closing.
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IMHO a good solution would be to clearly indicate at the top that you’re looking at old messages (allowing the site’s admins to decide what counts as “old”, of course). The main problem I have with necroposting is that I don’t always realise I’m looking at a thread that’s five years old, but a clear notice at the top — or always on-screen until you get to the newer messages — would probably help a lot.
A notice in between the old and new posts, like is done on here, helps a bit, but obviously not before you get to it.
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I forgot one thing:
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Doing "there are new posts" notifications as popups covering reading area is retarded. Please don't do it.
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@MrL said in The forum life:
I forgot one thing:
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Doing "there are new posts" notifications as popups covering reading area is retarded. Please don't do it.
Especially if it covers an active object you're about to click/tap, so that your interaction goes elsewhere.
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@HardwareGeek I wanted to upvote this post, but I got sent to another thread.
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@Gurth said in The forum life:
IMHO a good solution would be to clearly indicate at the top that you’re looking at old messages (allowing the site’s admins to decide what counts as “old”, of course). The main problem I have with necroposting is that I don’t always realise I’m looking at a thread that’s five years old, but a clear notice at the top — or always on-screen until you get to the newer messages — would probably help a lot.
A notice in between the old and new posts, like is done on here, helps a bit, but obviously not before you get to it.
For this usecase, nodebb pops up a warning if you are posting to a thread where the latest post is at least (I think) 2 months old.
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@PleegWat That’s too late, if you ask me :) At least if it pops up after having already typed a reply — giving the warning as you begin to reply is more helpful, but I would still have the feeling that I would have liked to have been told even before then.
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Some of the classic toxic hellstew (even PHP) platforms place such a warning above the quick reply box even before you start typing for last post > x days (where x is defined in admin)
This may not help if you try to reply to a post from that far back even if the thread itself isn't, though.
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@Gurth A quick test (coder challenge has been rather inactive lately) indicate it does indeed already pop up on hitting the reply button.
Though not when replying to an old post in an active topic.
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Ok, look, this whole 'looking for new forum formula' thing is completely backwards. The correct path to good forum software is not collecting cool ideas, or asking people about this or that feature, or modeling perfect discussion.
It's letting people talk.
Internet forum is just that - people talking. Multiple people talking simultanously in multiple places at once, but it's still just people talking to each other. You may think that it's completely different, because it's the interonets and that's a magical place, but that's wrong. People are still people and they just talk to each other.
Rigid categorisation, anti derailing, profanity filters, post limits, no necroing, karma points. Dude, did you ever talk to a real human being? Like, for more than 5 minutes?
The most impactful element on a forum is people. People with mod/admin rights the most, but regular members too. They make or break the forum. It's kind of like at work in IT - the process, agile, waterfall, chaos, whatever, is secondary to people you cooperate with. On top of people running the forum all you can do for good is make talking easier. That's it. All that 'modeling better communities', 'grooming better discussions' crap is just entitled social engineering - which can only make things worse, never better.
So... make important info visible, hide all inconsequential crap. Noone is impressed by puking statistics on their screen. Don't impose any limits/barriers/blocks. Either make communities work them out themselves or at least make them optional (off by default, ffs). Loose all interactive, popup, flashy shit. Strobing people works great during interrogations, not when they want to just talk.
If you want to add some "cool" features, make them optional. They are crap, but you have some ego thing going here, so ok add them, but don't force them on people.Right, but above all, make posting easy. Quote, multiquote, embed, emots, media upload - make those easy. Make them easy on desktop and mobile alike. Add preview that actually works - all the time, not for small subset of functionalities.
And make searching easy - it's the interonetos and this should be easier here - finding stuff from the past.That's it. Make talking easy, let communities set their own rules, use digital stuff to make talking even easier.
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@MrL ah, but you see my opening post was very specific to certain things that I wanted to know about. Specifically I asked about 1) importance of reading flow, 2) complexity of posting tools, 3 & 4) how much ancillary crap might people want and vague differences on new vs recurrent users for information priorities (and what info is important), 5) old discussions coming back with that “and another thing”, 6) stuff that’s often considered directly adjacent to posting but that actually isn’t and 7) live new content for reading, especially while writing.
The rest of it, all the things you’re getting at, I already had in mind. The categorisation, the blurbing of stats everywhere etc, those were all things I have very definite thoughts on, and for the most part are just “fuck off out the way” because while I think categorisation of topics is neat (to be able to find them again), it’s still pretty secondary to the actual talking part.
But I deliberately didn’t want to skew the outcome to reinforce what I already thought, so instead asked the questions about things I still wanted to know, just without signposting the things that I wanted to otherwise learn on the side.
I am sure as shit not interested in “grooming better communities”, Atwood and co can keep their Civilized Discourse all they like. But he wasn’t wrong that the classic forum format needed a review. I’m also sure we can do better in a variety of ways than we’re currently doing now.
But what I am interested in is what the evolution of the forum is, on the assumption that it isn’t something like Slack/Discord/Teams, and assuming it is not, and that it is not necessarily like Discourse and NodeBB with their own weird assertions… what does that look like?
There’s more stuff I have to share in the course of my research (as I’m still collecting info) but that’ll come later when I’m not at work. (Since I do actually have to do some work this week.)
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@Arantor
My post was not meant to be accusatory towards you, please don't take it that way. It's just a bunch of thoughts I had about forums, while absorbing large quantities of alcohol.I like what you are doing here and I'm curious what will come from it.
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@MrL I know, it’s all good. I have had similar thoughts when I’ve spoken to others, who focus so much on the things that don’t matter.
I do have flashbacks to St Jeff at times when I talk about forums with people and the “do you ever speak to people” part resonates very strongly.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
- Infinite scroll, yay/nay? If yay, what do you like about it? If nay, what about it makes you reflexively hate it?
I think pagination is better because it's easier to conceptualize how far into the past you're jumping.
- How often do you need to express something that mostly-basic Markdown can’t do? Do you find yourself missing bbcode?
Markdown can't do spoilers and it can't do underlines.
- When you first visit a forum for the first time, how do you get there and what information do you want to see?
I get there either by Bing or being led there by a link. Either way, I'm probably being led to a specific post, so I want to see that post and the date on which it was posted, which is an input I use to see how reliable the post is. (e.g. if it's about troubleshooting something that changed 5 years ago, and the post is 10 years old, I want to know that.) Also, there should be a sign-up to the forum link around somewhere.
- When you return to a forum (having registered and are now conceptually on the journey to becoming a regular), what are the first and second things you most want to get at or be shown on the screen? (If you have a top 3, or more, please share)
- How many replies to my posts there have been.
- How many non-reply engagements (likes or etc) to my posts there have been.
- The list of topics, probably categorized in whatever way makes sense for your forum. (Here we'd have The Lounge and General and The Garage and etc.)
- Does necroposting annoy you? If so, how come?
It depends. If the forum has a culture of sorting different conversations into mega threads, like we do, necroposting is fine. If the culture of the forum is more one-off conversations about specific items, necroposting is bad.
My shoulder aliens tell me that you're trying to build a new forum software, though, so trying to dictate whether necroposting is good or bad as the developer of forum software is a Jeff-like mistake. Your new software should support either kind of community.
- Do you care about the ability to create polls?
No.
- Live streaming of posts/updates as they happen, good, bad, you don’t care?
Probably bad. If you can figure out a way to do it so that you're never moving my reading position as I'm reading something, I don't care. But if someone edits a post above where I'm reading and it causes my screen to move? Not good.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in The forum life:
trying to dictate whether ... is good or bad as the developer of forum software is a Jeff-like mistake.
This. Admin options are good. User options are better. Enforced behavior is double-plus ungood.
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@HardwareGeek said in The forum life:
This. Admin options are good. User options are better. Enforced behavior is double-plus ungood.
Enforced behavior delivers predictable response at lower complexity.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in The forum life:
so trying to dictate whether necroposting is good or bad as the developer of forum software is a Jeff-like mistake.
This is why I wanted to get some feedback for my shoulder aliens to inform their battle plans.
I've seen communities over the years that love necroposting (not even just in our megathread style), I've seen communities get what passes for militant about it, and I've seen communities that get militant about it but also choose not to actually use even the tools they have to resolve it.
Consider a forum that has been around a while - a support forum in particular. User does a search on a generic error message, lands on a topic from way-back-when, in the board for the wrong version, necros anyway. Now, were it me, I'd have locked all the topics from years ago in said board because the odds that any of them will be relevant are so negligible it's not even worth trying to calculate; but the administration refuse to archive the board, or lock all the historical topics 'just in case'. Even though said support board is for a version that has been EOL for years at this point. Such cases are not uncommon and the failure to use the tools available is just as damning as the users' failure to understand the mis-context of the situation.
I more wanted to get a sense of what different people thought about necroposting in general, rather than letting it be a software led choice.
I mean: there are considerations around perhaps trying to summarise old topics (maybe with AI?) and archive them, depending on the nature of it.
What I do know is that there is a definite bias within 'the forum community' that old topics are valuable because they're essentially long-tail content that brings people in.
But of course, archival of old content is only useful if you can find what you're looking for, and I sometimes wonder if having some kind of AI summary on old topics might be a useful feature in some contexts.
I also find it interesting when I get necro likes on posts from 5+ years ago.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
I also find it interesting when I get necro likes on posts from 5+ years ago.
On the infrequent occasions I do that, it's almost always because somebody necroposted in a topic I hadn't read previously, so I start reading and liking before I notice how old the unread posts are. So for me, at least, however you solve the necroposting "problem" affects the necro likes similarly.
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@HardwareGeek I suppose that's really what I'm asking.
Is it a problem? If we assume that it is a situation that needs addressing, is it also of interest or relevance to consider fixing related behaviours like disabling likes/reactions on old content?
The socials, of course, make it sufficiently hard to get to older content for the most part that this is largely irrelevant a discussion for them.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Is it a problem?
That seems to be a matter of opinion. That's why I put the word in scare quotes.
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Is it a problem? If we assume that it is a situation that needs addressing, is it also of interest or relevance to consider fixing related behaviours like disabling likes/reactions on old content?
I don't think it's a problem. But there are technically two sides to it. Is the problem that a (certain) user receives a notification about a necro-like, or is the problem that necro likes are possible in the first place.
Giving each user an option to disable notifications from likes/interactions with posts older than X could be a neat option. Just like there's the option here to only get notifications on first like, then like 5 likes, then ten likes and so on. That's different from disabling interactions with old posts (I kinda like the odd notification about something from X years ago; I usually go and see what it was about.)
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@Arantor said in The forum life:
Consider a forum that has been around a while - a support forum in particular. User does a search on a generic error message, lands on a topic from way-back-when, in the board for the wrong version, necros anyway. Now, were it me, I'd have locked all the topics from years ago in said board because the odds that any of them will be relevant are so negligible it's not even worth trying to calculate; but the administration refuse to archive the board, or lock all the historical topics 'just in case'. Even though said support board is for a version that has been EOL for years at this point. Such cases are not uncommon and the failure to use the tools available is just as damning as the users' failure to understand the mis-context of the situation.
See, that's why I said that it depends on the culture. I was specifically thinking about support forums, which don't have culture. That's the kind of place where you wouldn't want necroposing.
My mental model of support forums is that all the answers are posted by paid helpdesk jockeys from whatever company made the product, and all the questions are posted by transient users, who show up, get their question answered, then leave.
The point of having a support forum rather than a real ticketing system is that people can read other people's issues, so ideally they'll search and find an existing post that answers their question, so you don't have to pay a helpdesk jockey to answer the same question for two different users. Allowing necroposting hurts the Googlability of the answers in your support forum, so in that case, it shouldn't be allowed.
I more wanted to get a sense of what different people thought about necroposting in general, rather than letting it be a software led choice.
I mean: there are considerations around perhaps trying to summarise old topics (maybe with AI?) and archive them, depending on the nature of it.
What I do know is that there is a definite bias within 'the forum community' that old topics are valuable because they're essentially long-tail content that brings people in.
But of course, archival of old content is only useful if you can find what you're looking for, and I sometimes wonder if having some kind of AI summary on old topics might be a useful feature in some contexts.
I can't imagine ChatGPT coming up with a useful summary (i.e. one that actually contains the right answer) of a topic in a tech support forum. I also can't imagine it coming up with a useful summary of one of our megathreads.
