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Ask HN: What's the right way to do forums?

11 points by newobj ↗ HN
Open ended question. What's the "right" way to both conceptualize and implement discussion forums for the community around a product or service?

Forums stem from a desire to facilitate arbitrary and semi-structured user<->user conversations or user<->service owner conversations, possibly with or without moderation.

Is there something better suited to this desire than "forum software" (regardless of whether it does or does not already exist)? I know Get Satisfaction et all are a new approach to user<->service owner, but they really shut out the user<->user community aspect. I'm not aware of any new modalities of user<->user discussions.

If forums are still the best tool we have for this purpose, what are some of the latest and greatest implementations of forums? I like Vanilla quite a bit but their pricing seems a bit steep. phpBB and its ilk seem very dated and bloated. Something like lamernews could be interesting but there are no topical areas, just a pile of unsortable threads of discussion.

Reddit fits in here somehow too I suppose, although a service owner may want to "own" the users rather than outsourcing discussions to some subreddit.

Thoughts?

13 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] thread
DanBC
Private news-servers (with strict community standards and moderation or after-moderation) is one method; although it's pretty tricky explaining it to most of your users and it's not fun to set up.
cultureulterior
The disadvantage of usenet (which I love dearly) is that conversations are forced into a tree. Personally, I think a DAG would be a better shape.
newobj
Seems way too high friction. In my head I was questioning even requiring users to register w/ email addresses.
typicalrunt
This is too weird. I was typing up a similar question today, wondering if structure forums are still superior in this age of Reddit-style websites.
newobj
I'm not a big reddit user, but I don't see how people keep up with the massive sprawl of the comment sections. I mean once you click into a story on Reddit (or HN, LN, etc), it seems like a pretty standard "threaded" affair which makes finding the latest bits of the conversation hard. And the nature of reddit/HN/LN etc make it hard for new topics to get traction, many people may never see new topics if the most popular ones float to the top.
polyfractal
Not to mention that discussion basically dies two days after any story.

Forums allow sophisticated discussions to occur for longer than 48 hours. My biggest complaint with HN is that discussions always terminate themselves shortly after the article moves from the frontpage. Its just too difficult to track new comments that aren't directly replied to your own.

fuzionmonkey
Agreed. For serious, long-term discussions, forums work a lot better than sites like reddit. As soon as a submission on reddit gets more than a few hundred comments, it really is hard to get everything.

I'm a big fan of serious hobby forums. Places like HardForum or the late TheGreenButton have lots of in-depth, long-standing, technical discussions. Discussions that just wouldn't be feasible on another software platform.

[dead] jcitme
I was always suprised why HN never implemented a system for a user tracking new comments.

How hard would it be to implement a slider that allows the client to choose up to how old should the comments be in black?

For example, say I browsed an article during lunch. 5 hours later, after work, I go back to a thread I read an set a slider to fade out everything older than 5 hours old, as though they were downvoted. Then all I have to do is to scroll down, and the stuff that I can still see is what I haven't read yet...

typicalrunt
Upvote to all of you. I hadn't realized this until today when I returned to this story and noticed that hardly anyone had responded to it. The story (and its comments) have basically died since it is off the "new" and "frontpage" sections of the site. However, if the story could somehow be found in a section on the HN site, I wonder if it would get more response and show some life. Just a thought...
sbarre
What is your (assumed) objection to using forum software?

A lot of the well-known ones out there are kind of crap (phpBB, vBulletin) but there are some nice offerings out there these days like bbPress[1] or Vanilla[2] that are open source and easy to set up, host and manage.

[1] http://bbpress.org/ [2] http://vanillaforums.org/

polyfractal
bbPress is pretty horrific. Vanilla is meh at best.

vBulletin is one of the better, well featured forums and scales well. I'm confused by your statments, do you actually use forums?

joshkaw
One of the things I've seen more than a few times is a failure to gain critical momentum. I have an untested hypothesis that this is due to attempting to start with multiple forums rather than a single 'general' forum. It's my belief that forcing this choice, and not providing a single page showing what's new in the forum lessens the likelihood of engagement with your users. Once your community gathers momentum, it should be easy to add new forums as 'general' starts getting busy. Having a problem with scaling is a good problem to have ;)