...and vBulleting, InvisionBoard, etc. (Not free, but that's what all the 'cool kids' had not-so-way-back...)
I'm very interested in trying this out. Besides the nostalgic kick of having dedicated forums come back the potential for moving forums forward is pretty great.
It's much more meta, for one thing. SO had a topic: programming. Here we don't have any particular topic, our goal is to make your topic successful, whatever it is, through open source software and community.
In other words Discourse is only successful in the sense that it lets you be successful.
Modern forum software is much-needed, so I'm glad to see this out there.
But does the design feel incredibly busy to anyone else? So many little icons and buttons, and I can't move my mouse without tooltips and popups everywhere.
StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work.
I remember reading a blog post, or maybe listening to a talk, where Jeff Atwood explained that this was on purpose because programmers like having lots of buttons and things (I'm paraphrasing really poorly here), but it seems to have carried over reasonably well to the other StackExchange sites.
> StackOverflow also has an extremely busy design, and it seems to work.
People often make the argument about HN being ugly and hard-to-use vs. those who think it is perfect for what it does (even saying that making it simpler would make it too easy for non-technical people to get involved, which always confused me). Personally, I think all three of these services could be much cleaner and user-friendly without Fisher-Pricing it.
> This is a similar to the argument people make about HN being ugly and hard-to-use vs. those who think it is perfect for what it does.
Apropos, my favorite suggestion for improvement in HN would be a menu item that lists direct replies to one's posts (something that Reddit does). Without this feature, some HN threads just expire because it becomes too difficult to follow them as time passes.
It turns the time stamps on a Hacker News comment page into buttons that hide/show comments that are the same age or older than the clicked time stamp.
It works on the threads page. There are probably some bugs, but it mostly works fine.
And now I can't reply to scott_s's reply (another weird quirk that I don't understand, since it doesn't seem to be tied to how nested the comment is), but even something as simple as renaming those links would help people ('threads' to 'your comments' and 'comments' to 'recent comments').
Edit: Now the reply link shows up. What's with the timer?
> And now I can't reply to scott_s's reply (another weird quirk that I don't understand, since it doesn't seem to be tied to how nested the comment is),
It's based on time. You can't reply immediately, you have to let some time pass. The idea is that it stops a conversation, a quick back and forth, and forces it to take a while, which should in theory encouraged more reasonable responses.
We made it as minimal as we could, but discussion is kind of a noisy activity by its nature.
That said, we want to have excellent skinning and theming support, and I'd love to see "even more minimal" themes. We ship a reasonable default theme for everyone to use, but it shouldn't be so good that nobody wants to replace it, right?
Can you clarify how "100% free and open-source" relates to "For enterprises, we plan to sell licenses and on-site private instances." ? Specifically, the licenses part.
Oh, OK. It's the dual-licensing GPL/DWTFYW arrangement. Why didn't you just say so? :)
BTW. Tried posting a reply in some thread on try.discourse - it showed up, but then disappeared in a second. Is it some sort of spam filter in action? The UX made no sense whatsoever.
Jeff,
Do you envision modifying the variables and mixins as the main way of handling themes? Or is there going to be an admin upload method or something else that you could elaborate on?
Hard to say since it's so early, but I view theming and skinning support as very, very important in the priority list. It's probably the #1 customization people do on forums! And probably on blogs as well...
This is the design of their demo. They aren't selling a design, they're selling software. With a bit of HTML, CSS, and Javascript fiddling, you can mould it into any shape you want.
The theme shops will appear if the software becomes popular enough.
The most annoying thing about web page UI these days is things that pop up in your face as you pass over them. You look at the page, decide to click something, and as you move your mouse toward it, BLAMO!, some nonsense about Twitter, Facebook, Like Me!, email me to all your friends! jumps up and covers the link you were about to click. You have to jiggle your mouse to shake it off.
Or you are reading, absentmindedly moving your mouse cursor around and POP! POP! POP! things jump out at you, often blocking what you were looking at.
If this forum software is going to become popular, I'm begging the developers to set the default so that you have to actually click an item to bring up a popup window or menu, and you have to at least hover for a while (not just be passing by) to bring up a tool tip.
Books and magazines don't randomly throw things in your face and block your view as you try to read. As you reach up to turn the page, the book doesn't turn into a cell phone already dialing your friends' numbers, insisting that you tell them about the chapter you're reading RIGHT NOW! I'd like my forums to be equally well behaved.
Hey that's pretty neat. It actually feels pretty different from a standard forum, which is nice. Discourse just feels somewhat samey to me; not much innovation.
It also seems very ego-heavy, with lots of user-centric stuff. I find that the more central the concept of a user is the lower the quality of discussion that follows.
Yes. My first impression was even worse than the usual PhpBB mess that you see every day.
At least your average PhpBB layout is relatively static.
In Discourse everything constantly flickers, pops up, slides out... The information I care about is buried under all sorts of noise; What are the 5 avatar icons in the thread-list supposed to tell me? Why is the thread-information below the first post? Why on earth are reply-quotes hidden by default and reveal with a painful sliding animation?
I love the simple interface of Stack Overflow. They added a lot of crap over the years but managed to keep it on the right side of the screen where it can be safely ignored (I'm only talking about the actual "question"-page, I haven't used any other SO-page in years).
Please make this look more like SO and less like someone trying to use all his favorite javascript widgets on every page...
I think the space is growing, especially in the rails world where it's been stagnating for so long. There's discourse, forem and I've even just released my own at http://www.thredded.com (source at http://github.com/jayroh/thredded)
It's definitely more along the same lines visually as the "traditional" forum but I'm hoping that the innovation in the future pops up in the small interactions. Replying, quoting, splitting threads, moderation, interaction via email, etc
Right now the basics are in place that I hope to build the really good flourishes around.
If anyone is intrigued feel free to ask me anything about it or find me on twitter - @thredded or @jayroh
It's great that they are offering this as a thing you can actually download and put on your own server or rent from a commodity hosting provider.
The great thing about traditional forums was that they made it possible to host discussions on controversial topics without fearing being culled by the platform owner. They also allow forum admins to be entirely free to set their own rules and create a marketplace in third party extensions.
Completely, forums are about basic human expression in paragraph form. This is an essential right and we want to give it back to the world in 100% no strings attached open source form.
Not that there aren't other forum choices, of course there are, but VERY few are 100% open source and even fewer are ones I want to use.
I've been beta testing Discourse for a few months now, and can tell you that this is going to have a huge impact on how we have discussions online.
Jeff Atwood has more insights into how humans communicate in an hour than I do in a year. Those insights are built right into the software, and I think that will help many communities take off that would otherwise collapse under the weight of trolls and apathy.
On a more selfish note, I'm excited to have an open source Ember.js app available from two of the best JavaScript developers in the world—Robin Ward and Sam Saffron. It's a great resource for the Ember community. If you haven't yet, make sure you head over to GitHub and check out what a modern Ember app looks like.
What problem does Discourse solve that Hacker News doesn't solve right now?
EDIT: Obviously it has a modern, nice interface. That's a win. But I mean more specifically, what problem of human dynamics does it solve that Hacker News doesn't solve?
Yes, but Jeff's post seems to suggest that there's something special in the design that contributes to more civilized discussion. I'm curious as to what that is. For example, does having a modern interface do that all by itself? Is there something special about the moderation interface? Little tricks isomorphic to the way HN makes you wait before replying to replies, and so on?
Whether used by hackers or not, these design features interest me greatly.
Community moderation based on increasing levels of trust worked well for StackOverflow and appears to be implemented for this as well. It's not unique to SO, but it works really well there and not (IMO) for Slashdot, so perhaps there is some difference that matters.
HN relies on a panel of hand-picked moderators, right? It works for HN, but perhaps not in other contexts.
I guess I don't have enough Karma to know how much moderation I could get in HN -- thought it was limited to downvoting. In SO, it gets quite thorough and you also get prompted to do some moderation (approve edits, etc).
A lot of the moderation stuff and trust metrics isn't visible on the surface. And to be honest, we've only implemented the first two (new user, not-new user) and final (appointed moderator) trust levels at the moment.
One way to think of this is as follows: what happens when posts get flagged? What's the sequence, who knows about it, and how? For that matter, who can flag?
We do have basic rate limits throughout the app, and they're all configurable as well.
Much of this has to evolve. I'd love your input on it, too!
I really think you are onto something. If you can bring the goodness from StackOverflow (automaticly gaining privileges based on how you interact etc) and provide a place for interesting discussions (yes, it seriously bugs me when several of the best answers i find on SO are marked as "Closed as not constructive.")
Looking forward to see it in use. Hopefully this will provide a more modern way to ask all those important questions that needs discussion.
Wait, your saying how awesome its trust metric is and how it will change everything. Then you say no one can see it. Then you admit that its not implemented yet.
This looks to be a technical solution to a social problem. What exactly is wrong, from a participant's perspective, with existing forum software? Sure, EE and phpBB et al are terrible technologies, but are the needs of the various communities really not being met? If so, how is Discourse an improvement?
HN isn't meant to solve the same problems as Discourse. Both attack on a common problem, which is making discussion meaningful, but the context is widely different. HN isn't meant to be used as a forum, it is a news discussion board, topics loose relevancy after just a couple days. Try adding lots of value to a topic by posting a reply after 48 hours, chances are, almost no one will see it, and even less people will reply to it. Forums don't work that way, you get discussions in forums which can last sometimes even years.
And considering other forum options, Discourse has probably a killer feature, which is "Best of" a thread. Forums are horrible for documentation, after a meaningful discussion topics usually go dead, and if you want to read an old topic (but relevantt to you) with 500 pages (or even just 20), it is painful, you don't need to read every single comment, and Discourse's "Best of" will (should) fix that. That is powerful.
HN has the problem that a high-voted comment that floats to the top, that might have a whole tree of less interesting discussion under it, keeps everything else stuck miles down the page.
So one persons comment can effectively derail most of the people viewing the thread into a cul-de-sac of discussing one specific point.
I'd rather see more information on one page than fixed width layout. Some threads can get veeery long and you have to go through a lot of comments to get to answer that is most important to you. Are you guys planning on experimenting with different layouts, or you'd rather not diverge from stackoverflow path ?
We do have a fully documented import and export format, however, we're not prioritizing conversion at this time because we believe there's too much technical and social friction to wholesale forum change.
And it's early, very early in our beta!
Mostly we expect early Discourse adopters to be of the "starting from scratch" kind.
I definitely need an importer to be able to use Discourse. I have been looking for a way to get away from PHPBB for years, and would happily move to Discourse, but if I can't bring my content and user posts with me, my community won't follow, either.
Unfortunately, this is one of the major general problems with forums. You just don't have an option. Import of old forums might be one of the bigger impacts you could make.
on the cards, message bus really is awesome, I plan to blog about it. can you put a request on meta for this? Also I would like to release the "general consumption" gems as MIT
Wow, this is exactly what the internet needs. Hopefully XDA developers moves to this. I am not sure that XDA is a good fit for Discourse, but the forums they use are exactly the wrong thing to use for such a site.
Builtin forum search is just terrible. Improve just that and using forums will be 3x better.
I always thought reddit would turn into the next-gen forum, especially after it went open source. But it didn't have as big of an impact as I hoped. reddit is a giant step beyond things like phpBB.
I cringed when I saw infinite scrolling as the first feature they're highlighting on the landing page. I expected it to completely break back/forward navigation (a la returning to your home page feed on Facebook or Twitter). However, I played around with the demo a bit, and I was pleased to see that they've somehow solved that problem. I'm still not a huge fan of infinite scrolling in general, but this looks like a significant improvement.
Thanks. I'll probably write up a blog post of how it's done eventually but the short version is we use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll down a topic stream, so you have a unique URL to go back to and share.
There is a little more intelligence as links within a topic just replace the state, but links to other topics push the state.
Also infinite scrolling downwards is easy to implement. Upwards is a huge headache.
I haven't tried it, but infinity scrolling is horrible, as is pagination. There is no limit on the size of webpages, so don't put artificial limits on them.
You say it "remembers my place" but does it remember my place across all of my devices? What if I want to link my friend to a comment? What about SEO, will my community turn up in google/bing's results?
If you `wget` the canonical URL of the page per the meta tags, it contains all of the comments in the HTML; everything is accessible to the search spiders.
1. If you log in across various devices you'll end up with links to the last post you read in the topic. Unlike other forum software we don't consider all posts on a "page" viewed when the page downloads, only as they are scrolled into view.
2. We use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll. Just grab the link from the URL bar and it'll take you to where you left off. Or additionally click the "Share button" for a copy and pastable pop up.
3. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for google indexing.
No, we were worried that rendering different content for google violates their TOS. So what we do is render a super basic version of the page in the <noscript> section with no tools or extras. You can see it if you disable javascript in your browser.
It's not much to use, but enough for google to get at the words and links.
We're not sure how well it works since the project was secret until today! We're going to keep an eye on it and adjust for maximum google-fu going forward.
Forum software is often clunky and old-fashioned graphic-design-wise, and its search features often are broken, and I'm sure it's not a barrel of laughs to moderate or administrate.
But what specifically about the user interaction and user experience is wrong about old forum software that is corrected in this new platform? The sandbox forum is very nice looking but does it operate much differently from old-school stuff? Ultimately I'm looking at a list of topics sorted by how recently they've been updated (and there doesn't even appear to be a way to change that order).
It's something that many people will consider pretty according to today's trends (fixed-width text, rounded corners and gradients and monochromatic icons and tooltips) but from reading the announcement I expected something more. Looking around the Discourse site, I just can't find what makes Discourse special and my first reaction after 5 minutes of poking around was "Well, okay...". Maybe someone else can explain it to me.
You have to look at the other choices to appreciate part of it. I know, this is a little bit like saying "we are the prettiest object in a room full of ugly objects".. but.. well, see for yourself:
I'd argue that Reddit and other link-aggregation sites like HN are the evolution of the online messsage board to an online-focused format, though self/text posts are possible to start general discussion.
The big thing missing is a way to 'sticky/pin' posts, though Reddit makes use of the sidebar to similar effect.
How Discourse's conversation threading model is quite interesting though, I'll be interested to see how well it scales.
I agree with you for the most part -- but how many times do you return to an old HN or Reddit thread a few hours later? It's very hard to see which comments are new. Even though I like threaded discussion I get a warm feeling about seeing that new posts notification on a flat thread I was posting in earlier, and it will make me go back and read the new posts, whereas on Reddit or HN I usually only go back if someone replied to me.
Judging from the beta (http://try.discourse.org/) it doesn't seem to provide anything new in terms of managing a civilized discourse. The structure of the posts is very similar to regular forums; the only difference being the explicit replies, but they almost do more harm than good in the current implementation (it's just an expandable <blockquote> and doesn't really help me understand the context).
What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit":
- Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community.
- Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about real-time, but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future.
- Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
Agreed. Forums have two powers: 1) being hugely deep sources of information and 2) places where great conversations can persist.
Because of that, your forum thread topic should really have two views (sorts, if you will): Top replies and chronologically (we'll call that the status quo). Either I want to engage in a thread's conversation, or I want to know what the meatiest reply of the conversation is (and its context).
One keeps a thread alive, and one serves to make it useful in a future context. I'm surprised this is completely absent.
Not sure if that was meant to be a rhetorical question, but here's my opinion:
"Best" posts--those which are a good source of information--have a high view-to-interaction ratio. An inflammatory post on a forum or Reddit tends to see more replies than the average. A good reference piece or poignant story seems more likely to stand on its own--it will have more views than most posts, and have a high view/reply ratio.
What separates a good post from an insignificant one is baseline views. If a thread has been opened 10000 times and everyone has read a certain comment, it's likely to be informative or controversial.
The "best of", even within a single topic/thread, is also per-user and temporal. The best-of in a thread to me is no longer a best-of when I've fully internalized it. I really value Reddit's collapse button/link for this reason.
I was looking for it, I suppose in the wrong places.
To answer your question, I'd have to agree with what was already written by eric-hu, except to say that bad or inflammatory posts also create a lot of response (trolls, as it were). I know it's maybe tired or clunky, but I think a forum can have both entertaining and useful replies, and thus should have a voting mechanism to indicate which are which. Yes, interaction can play a role in how important they are, and to maybe help massage ranking, but I think people are happy with and familiar with a system of voting for content.
That said, a token "good post" should be able to stand for itself. I envision a system where the top posts (be they replies to other posts or posts in and of themselves) sit flat among each other, ranked by their usefulness or entertainment value.
I think a forum moderator's real value in this situation is not to mess with the community's decisiveness, but to resolve matters of content relevance (to keep a community focused).
I remember the first time I used threaded comments. I moved from the 1D world to the 2D world, and it felt right. I can't go back to 1D. I feel cramped.
I find it interesting how Tumblr can frame a reply as a post, a different highlighting of the fractal flow of conversation, though ain't nobody got time for that, imo. I'll stick with plain ol' threaded HN/Reddit (though I think I remember finding a parent post for deep links to HN annoyingly unintuitive).
I like the new UX ideas. I'm wondering if instances will be able to federate, and the 'front page term[/hashtag](s)' for the discussion area of a certain website on a topic could be framed differently.
Some topics are going to get to crazy posting speed. Watching Reddit posts with new set on isn't that fun. An IRC/Jabber MUC format would be good for times, and Facebook autoupdates its newsfeed anyway. An IM system with text (and at least url) post and their replies upvoted, and maybe filtered in some tiling window like fashion?
But with 2D comments, there's rarely any actual discussion. It's mostly people stating their opinions and others individually responding to them.
Looking at the demo page, I love how the threads are 1D, but you can still switch to direct replies if you just want to follow the sub-conversation. It's the best of both worlds.
How many individuals have the means to sustain an online conversation? I love threaded conversations because they are so easily branched. However, I do wish there were a visual indication of the flow of discussions between two individuals.
Which brings up an interesting thought: why does a discussion have to be between two individuals? If we are all reading the two current sides to a discussion, are we not all entitled to share our opinion to continue the discussion? It's then a group discussion.
Downsides to conversations with more then two people:
* It is harder to build mental model of opposing view as the number of people on the opposing side increases do to inconsistances in their view points, experience, and reasons.
* It can be harder to judge how much an influence your arguments have the more people who are participating.
* Reinforcement with a peer group. There can be a tendency to not examining a topic closely if there is a peer group that shares the opinion and is holding strong in their opinion.
There are many advantages to one on one conversations that are lost in group discussions. I would love to retain the benefits of one on one conversations but on a forum involving N people. I do not think there is an easy solution though.
The best discussion platform I use is one semi-private one (it's closed), where you have unlimited tree structure and every node is equal whether it's a comment, category or "forum". You can differentiate a bit by using a template (which is just another node in the tree). For example you can view the discussion in 1D if you want.. but there's really no point.
Example: HN in that setting would be just one node, called Hacker News. Each submission would be a post/comment and all the comments from here would be just subcomments under that parent post. If someone posted here about new language for example, that post along with all discussion under it can be become a new "forum". If you move it away from under HN, you can still leave a hardlink there so it won't be lost.
Is the discussion there civilized though? Mostly not.
Threaded comments are not too complex. The main thing I want is a bidirectional NNTP gateway, so I can use nice clients to handle updating threads without having to trudge through the stuff that hasn't.
At some point in the future I think technology advances enough to where it makes sense to have fairly beefy client apps for discussions. Modern forums are based off of the idea that basically everyone sees the same views all the time. This is why you have to invent various tricks (like pagination "last read" state, quoting, and threading) to try to manage information density so that conversations don't become unwieldy too quickly. Although most such techniques are only slightly effective compared to the tried and true techniques of the good old days of usenet.
As another commenter pointed out, forums tend to serve one of two needs. Either they are a source of information, or they can be a place for casual conversations.
Your list of 'wants' mainly speaks to forums being a source of information. People ask questions, remark on current events, debate and discuss and create a long-term record of thoughtful discussions.
But Discourse appears to be geared more towards the community aspects of a forum. Mentions between members of a community are relevant in this case, since it gets users into threads and posting. Real-time features lower the friction of using the software and increase rapid-fire communication (we call that "banter") between members. Avatars on the topic index make it easy to see which of your friends are posting in which threads, so you can better decide where to go next.
For this group, forums represent a "Third Place"[1] community outside of their home and workplace groups. I've been building forums software similar to Discourse, on my own for the past year, wagering that this second group of users is larger than the first, and that their needs are only accidentally addressed by the current generation of forums software. I'm anxious to see whether Discourse finds traction in this respect.
It does, but the trust metric we use is not very visible on the surface. Which is sort of by design. There is a hint of it on the user page if you know where to look! :)
Probably the main visible entry point is flagging, so try flagging a post or topic.
It's also hard to see the moderation functions from the outside, but I assure you that they're as frictionless as we could make them! For example, multi-selecting posts, splitting topics, merging topics, locking topics, archiving topics, etc.
There's still a lot to do, we have no way of selecting multiple topics at the moment, for example. But I encourage you to try out the Vagrant image if you want to hack on Discourse quickly. It includes a small db, and you'll be a moderator there.
Interestingly, as an early users of the software, I got mostly the exact opposite feeling.
Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community
Ember used Discourse for the past several months. We provided a ton of feedback and I like to think that our participation served exactly this purpose: building Discourse for a real community.
Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic
There is also an "aggregated links" view that aggregates all of the outbound links from a thread and shows how many times they have been clicked on.
Discourse has moderator tools for "closing" threads. I would expect that closed threads would work well together with the "Best of" view.
Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
I think this is one of the team's highest priorities. There is some innovation in the way replies work, but it's also possible to "reply as a new thread", with margin links between the threads. I have found this to be a very good compromise, and something that explicitly attempts to tackle your desire here.
In short, I think there's more depth here than you're seeing at first glance, and the things you want to see from Discourse are things the team is actively thinking about.
Following yesterday's discussion on Ember.js / AngularJS (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5168803) I think this is one more item in the "why to give Ember a try" side (Just for the mere fact that SE chose it over other alternatives, used it and open sourced it, and had you somehow involved I assume). Were you consulting them on Ember development aspects? Were you involved in the development somehow? do they use version 1.0?
Were you consulting them on Ember development aspects?
We worked with Robin and Sam as community members over the past few months as they worked on Discourse. Frankly, they're both rock stars, and managed the entire project with surprisingly little direction from us.
Were you involved in the development somehow?
I think the largest extent of direct code collaboration between the Ember team and Discourse was Erik Bryn's work on the `group` helper. Other than that, they asked us questions from time to time and we answered them.
do they use version 1.0?
Yes! I was insanely impressed by Robin's ability to get the (rather large) Discourse codebase ported over to Ember 1.0 pre4 within days of us shipping it. As has been mentioned on other threads, there has been a bunch of churn in the run-up to 1.0, and Robin took it like a champ. The code is largely idiomatic Ember 1.0 code, and reads well to me.
Thanks, very valuable information, was looking for a large v 1 real world implementation to learn from, (endorsed by ember maintainers). This is great. Thanks
Interestingly, as an early users of the software, I got mostly the exact opposite feeling.
Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community
Ember used Discourse for the past several months. We provided a ton of feedback and I like to think that our participation served exactly this purpose: building Discourse for a real community.
Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic
There is also an "aggregated links" view that aggregates all of the outbound links from a thread and shows how many times they have been clicked on.
Discourse has moderator tools for "closing" threads. I would expect that closed threads would work well together with the "Best of" view.
Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
I think this is one of the team's highest priorities. There is some innovation in the way replies work, but it's also possible to "reply as a new thread", with margin links between the threads. I have found this to be a very good compromise, and something that explicitly attempts to tackle your desire here.
In short, I think there's more depth here than you're seeing at first glance, and the things you want to see from Discourse are things the team is actively thinking about.
Yeah, I have to agree. Reading his blog post, and then the documentation on the site, I got the image of some great new designs to manage the "Information Architecture" of an online persistent discussion (a thread). But instead when I actually logged in and browsed around, all I got was reddit with nicer formatting.
> Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
Definitely. I basically want a forum that looks like gitk (but flipped, obviously). Clear replies, multiple parents, but sorted chronologically and without indentation. Higher or lower rated posts could be marked typographically.
280 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadI'm very interested in trying this out. Besides the nostalgic kick of having dedicated forums come back the potential for moving forums forward is pretty great.
Speaking of the wordpress of forums, does anyone have experience with http://bbpress.org/ ?
This is much more open-ended, and however nice it might be, there are other products attempting the same thing already.
In other words Discourse is only successful in the sense that it lets you be successful.
But does the design feel incredibly busy to anyone else? So many little icons and buttons, and I can't move my mouse without tooltips and popups everywhere.
I remember reading a blog post, or maybe listening to a talk, where Jeff Atwood explained that this was on purpose because programmers like having lots of buttons and things (I'm paraphrasing really poorly here), but it seems to have carried over reasonably well to the other StackExchange sites.
The design's being so busy has prevented me from exploring the site.
I wish I knew of a browser extension or a bookmarklet to make the site more sedate by, e.g., deleting some of the elements on the page.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylebot/oiaejidbm...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/
People often make the argument about HN being ugly and hard-to-use vs. those who think it is perfect for what it does (even saying that making it simpler would make it too easy for non-technical people to get involved, which always confused me). Personally, I think all three of these services could be much cleaner and user-friendly without Fisher-Pricing it.
Apropos, my favorite suggestion for improvement in HN would be a menu item that lists direct replies to one's posts (something that Reddit does). Without this feature, some HN threads just expire because it becomes too difficult to follow them as time passes.
https://gist.github.com/maxerickson/4718499
It turns the time stamps on a Hacker News comment page into buttons that hide/show comments that are the same age or older than the clicked time stamp.
It works on the threads page. There are probably some bugs, but it mostly works fine.
http://hnnotify.com/
Edit: Now the reply link shows up. What's with the timer?
It's based on time. You can't reply immediately, you have to let some time pass. The idea is that it stops a conversation, a quick back and forth, and forces it to take a while, which should in theory encouraged more reasonable responses.
That said, we want to have excellent skinning and theming support, and I'd love to see "even more minimal" themes. We ship a reasonable default theme for everyone to use, but it shouldn't be so good that nobody wants to replace it, right?
Can you clarify how "100% free and open-source" relates to "For enterprises, we plan to sell licenses and on-site private instances." ? Specifically, the licenses part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
BTW. Tried posting a reply in some thread on try.discourse - it showed up, but then disappeared in a second. Is it some sort of spam filter in action? The UX made no sense whatsoever.
Thanks.
Only if you choose to make it so (and you have).
Hacker News demonstrates that it need not be.
The theme shops will appear if the software becomes popular enough.
Or you are reading, absentmindedly moving your mouse cursor around and POP! POP! POP! things jump out at you, often blocking what you were looking at.
If this forum software is going to become popular, I'm begging the developers to set the default so that you have to actually click an item to bring up a popup window or menu, and you have to at least hover for a while (not just be passing by) to bring up a tool tip.
Books and magazines don't randomly throw things in your face and block your view as you try to read. As you reach up to turn the page, the book doesn't turn into a cell phone already dialing your friends' numbers, insisting that you tell them about the chapter you're reading RIGHT NOW! I'd like my forums to be equally well behaved.
Then you will enjoy this I suspect - http://pivory.com
Yes. My first impression was even worse than the usual PhpBB mess that you see every day.
At least your average PhpBB layout is relatively static.
In Discourse everything constantly flickers, pops up, slides out... The information I care about is buried under all sorts of noise; What are the 5 avatar icons in the thread-list supposed to tell me? Why is the thread-information below the first post? Why on earth are reply-quotes hidden by default and reveal with a painful sliding animation?
I love the simple interface of Stack Overflow. They added a lot of crap over the years but managed to keep it on the right side of the screen where it can be safely ignored (I'm only talking about the actual "question"-page, I haven't used any other SO-page in years).
Please make this look more like SO and less like someone trying to use all his favorite javascript widgets on every page...
It's definitely more along the same lines visually as the "traditional" forum but I'm hoping that the innovation in the future pops up in the small interactions. Replying, quoting, splitting threads, moderation, interaction via email, etc
Right now the basics are in place that I hope to build the really good flourishes around.
If anyone is intrigued feel free to ask me anything about it or find me on twitter - @thredded or @jayroh
The great thing about traditional forums was that they made it possible to host discussions on controversial topics without fearing being culled by the platform owner. They also allow forum admins to be entirely free to set their own rules and create a marketplace in third party extensions.
Not that there aren't other forum choices, of course there are, but VERY few are 100% open source and even fewer are ones I want to use.
Jeff Atwood has more insights into how humans communicate in an hour than I do in a year. Those insights are built right into the software, and I think that will help many communities take off that would otherwise collapse under the weight of trolls and apathy.
On a more selfish note, I'm excited to have an open source Ember.js app available from two of the best JavaScript developers in the world—Robin Ward and Sam Saffron. It's a great resource for the Ember community. If you haven't yet, make sure you head over to GitHub and check out what a modern Ember app looks like.
EDIT: Obviously it has a modern, nice interface. That's a win. But I mean more specifically, what problem of human dynamics does it solve that Hacker News doesn't solve?
Whether used by hackers or not, these design features interest me greatly.
HN relies on a panel of hand-picked moderators, right? It works for HN, but perhaps not in other contexts.
One way to think of this is as follows: what happens when posts get flagged? What's the sequence, who knows about it, and how? For that matter, who can flag?
We do have basic rate limits throughout the app, and they're all configurable as well.
Much of this has to evolve. I'd love your input on it, too!
Looking forward to see it in use. Hopefully this will provide a more modern way to ask all those important questions that needs discussion.
And considering other forum options, Discourse has probably a killer feature, which is "Best of" a thread. Forums are horrible for documentation, after a meaningful discussion topics usually go dead, and if you want to read an old topic (but relevantt to you) with 500 pages (or even just 20), it is painful, you don't need to read every single comment, and Discourse's "Best of" will (should) fix that. That is powerful.
So one persons comment can effectively derail most of the people viewing the thread into a cul-de-sac of discussing one specific point.
All the vested_contributors or trolls or etc.
And it's early, very early in our beta!
Mostly we expect early Discourse adopters to be of the "starting from scratch" kind.
Unfortunately, this is one of the major general problems with forums. You just don't have an option. Import of old forums might be one of the bigger impacts you could make.
Ember.js and Rails backend vs. C#/.NET
Well, granted, Postline still uses frames, and I know only one site that uses it (and I tried using it once, got too confused and dropped out)
Builtin forum search is just terrible. Improve just that and using forums will be 3x better.
There is a little more intelligence as links within a topic just replace the state, but links to other topics push the state.
Also infinite scrolling downwards is easy to implement. Upwards is a huge headache.
Database can't handle the load? Put caching in.
Ever tried to read a long article online? I have seen them split over 15 pages.
And yes, I always click the print/view on one page button.
And it is even more insulting with comments -- I am not going to click/scroll just to see ten more comments.
You say it "remembers my place" but does it remember my place across all of my devices? What if I want to link my friend to a comment? What about SEO, will my community turn up in google/bing's results?
The fact that there's a permalink bar on every single comment was the first thing I noticed, since it highlights on hover anywhere on the comment.
http://try.discourse.org/t/this-site-is-a-sandbox-it-is-rese...
If you `wget` the canonical URL of the page per the meta tags, it contains all of the comments in the HTML; everything is accessible to the search spiders.
2. We use HTML5 replaceState to update the URL as you scroll. Just grab the link from the URL bar and it'll take you to where you left off. Or additionally click the "Share button" for a copy and pastable pop up.
3. Yes we render a lightweight version of the pages in a <noscript> tag for google indexing.
Can you explain it in more detail? Are you returning different results to Google bots?
It's not much to use, but enough for google to get at the words and links.
We're not sure how well it works since the project was secret until today! We're going to keep an eye on it and adjust for maximum google-fu going forward.
(Shout out to Sam Saffron who implemented this!)
Been going through the assets/js and it's really amazing quality code.
But what specifically about the user interaction and user experience is wrong about old forum software that is corrected in this new platform? The sandbox forum is very nice looking but does it operate much differently from old-school stuff? Ultimately I'm looking at a list of topics sorted by how recently they've been updated (and there doesn't even appear to be a way to change that order).
http://www.forumcon.com/
There are very, very few 1st tier forums that are fully open source, too. None that I know of!
The big thing missing is a way to 'sticky/pin' posts, though Reddit makes use of the sidebar to similar effect.
How Discourse's conversation threading model is quite interesting though, I'll be interested to see how well it scales.
What I want from a "civilized discourse construction kit":
- Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community.
- Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic. In general: Don't make the threads all about real-time, but rather focus on how they can be useful in the future.
- Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
- Encourage longer responses.
There was recently a good thread on Reddit about this: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/171xod/the_joys...
As far as building it for a real community goes; judging from their 'Buy it' page it seems that's exactly what they're planning to do next.
We view badges as alternatives to reading FAQs and community guidelines.
Because of that, your forum thread topic should really have two views (sorts, if you will): Top replies and chronologically (we'll call that the status quo). Either I want to engage in a thread's conversation, or I want to know what the meatiest reply of the conversation is (and its context).
One keeps a thread alive, and one serves to make it useful in a future context. I'm surprised this is completely absent.
Thought experiment: how does one quantify the 'best' posts on a discussion topic? Discourse has some ideas about this, and I bet you do too.
"Best" posts--those which are a good source of information--have a high view-to-interaction ratio. An inflammatory post on a forum or Reddit tends to see more replies than the average. A good reference piece or poignant story seems more likely to stand on its own--it will have more views than most posts, and have a high view/reply ratio.
What separates a good post from an insignificant one is baseline views. If a thread has been opened 10000 times and everyone has read a certain comment, it's likely to be informative or controversial.
The "best of", even within a single topic/thread, is also per-user and temporal. The best-of in a thread to me is no longer a best-of when I've fully internalized it. I really value Reddit's collapse button/link for this reason.
To answer your question, I'd have to agree with what was already written by eric-hu, except to say that bad or inflammatory posts also create a lot of response (trolls, as it were). I know it's maybe tired or clunky, but I think a forum can have both entertaining and useful replies, and thus should have a voting mechanism to indicate which are which. Yes, interaction can play a role in how important they are, and to maybe help massage ranking, but I think people are happy with and familiar with a system of voting for content.
That said, a token "good post" should be able to stand for itself. I envision a system where the top posts (be they replies to other posts or posts in and of themselves) sit flat among each other, ranked by their usefulness or entertainment value.
I think a forum moderator's real value in this situation is not to mess with the community's decisiveness, but to resolve matters of content relevance (to keep a community focused).
edit; ah, it has that - http://try.discourse.org/t/yo-dawg-heard-you-like-replies-so....
I like the new UX ideas. I'm wondering if instances will be able to federate, and the 'front page term[/hashtag](s)' for the discussion area of a certain website on a topic could be framed differently.
Some topics are going to get to crazy posting speed. Watching Reddit posts with new set on isn't that fun. An IRC/Jabber MUC format would be good for times, and Facebook autoupdates its newsfeed anyway. An IM system with text (and at least url) post and their replies upvoted, and maybe filtered in some tiling window like fashion?
There's my half-baked idea for the evening!
Looking at the demo page, I love how the threads are 1D, but you can still switch to direct replies if you just want to follow the sub-conversation. It's the best of both worlds.
Which brings up an interesting thought: why does a discussion have to be between two individuals? If we are all reading the two current sides to a discussion, are we not all entitled to share our opinion to continue the discussion? It's then a group discussion.
* It is harder to build mental model of opposing view as the number of people on the opposing side increases do to inconsistances in their view points, experience, and reasons.
* It can be harder to judge how much an influence your arguments have the more people who are participating.
* Reinforcement with a peer group. There can be a tendency to not examining a topic closely if there is a peer group that shares the opinion and is holding strong in their opinion.
There are many advantages to one on one conversations that are lost in group discussions. I would love to retain the benefits of one on one conversations but on a forum involving N people. I do not think there is an easy solution though.
Example: HN in that setting would be just one node, called Hacker News. Each submission would be a post/comment and all the comments from here would be just subcomments under that parent post. If someone posted here about new language for example, that post along with all discussion under it can be become a new "forum". If you move it away from under HN, you can still leave a hardlink there so it won't be lost.
Is the discussion there civilized though? Mostly not.
Your list of 'wants' mainly speaks to forums being a source of information. People ask questions, remark on current events, debate and discuss and create a long-term record of thoughtful discussions.
But Discourse appears to be geared more towards the community aspects of a forum. Mentions between members of a community are relevant in this case, since it gets users into threads and posting. Real-time features lower the friction of using the software and increase rapid-fire communication (we call that "banter") between members. Avatars on the topic index make it easy to see which of your friends are posting in which threads, so you can better decide where to go next.
For this group, forums represent a "Third Place"[1] community outside of their home and workplace groups. I've been building forums software similar to Discourse, on my own for the past year, wagering that this second group of users is larger than the first, and that their needs are only accidentally addressed by the current generation of forums software. I'm anxious to see whether Discourse finds traction in this respect.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
Probably the main visible entry point is flagging, so try flagging a post or topic.
It's also hard to see the moderation functions from the outside, but I assure you that they're as frictionless as we could make them! For example, multi-selecting posts, splitting topics, merging topics, locking topics, archiving topics, etc.
There's still a lot to do, we have no way of selecting multiple topics at the moment, for example. But I encourage you to try out the Vagrant image if you want to hack on Discourse quickly. It includes a small db, and you'll be a moderator there.
Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community
Ember used Discourse for the past several months. We provided a ton of feedback and I like to think that our participation served exactly this purpose: building Discourse for a real community.
Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic
I'm not sure how much of this comes across in the pitch, but these specific goals are focuses of the software. For example, Discourse supports a "Best of Thread" view (see https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/app/models/pos... and https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/lib/score_calc...), which is currently only triggered on a very high threshold. I like this feature a lot. You could easily imagine it being possible for moderators to hand-curate the "Best of" view in the future.
There is also an "aggregated links" view that aggregates all of the outbound links from a thread and shows how many times they have been clicked on.
Discourse has moderator tools for "closing" threads. I would expect that closed threads would work well together with the "Best of" view.
Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
I think this is one of the team's highest priorities. There is some innovation in the way replies work, but it's also possible to "reply as a new thread", with margin links between the threads. I have found this to be a very good compromise, and something that explicitly attempts to tackle your desire here.
In short, I think there's more depth here than you're seeing at first glance, and the things you want to see from Discourse are things the team is actively thinking about.
We worked with Robin and Sam as community members over the past few months as they worked on Discourse. Frankly, they're both rock stars, and managed the entire project with surprisingly little direction from us.
Were you involved in the development somehow?
I think the largest extent of direct code collaboration between the Ember team and Discourse was Erik Bryn's work on the `group` helper. Other than that, they asked us questions from time to time and we answered them.
do they use version 1.0?
Yes! I was insanely impressed by Robin's ability to get the (rather large) Discourse codebase ported over to Ember 1.0 pre4 within days of us shipping it. As has been mentioned on other threads, there has been a bunch of churn in the run-up to 1.0, and Robin took it like a champ. The code is largely idiomatic Ember 1.0 code, and reads well to me.
Build it for a real community and try to make it work within that community
Ember used Discourse for the past several months. We provided a ton of feedback and I like to think that our participation served exactly this purpose: building Discourse for a real community.
Make it possible to close threads, write summary for threads, group threads together, explore a topic
I'm not sure how much of this comes across in the pitch, but these specific goals are focuses of the software. For example, Discourse supports a "Best of Thread" view (see https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/app/models/pos... and https://github.com/discourse/core/blob/master/lib/score_calc...), which is currently only triggered on a very high threshold. I like this feature a lot. You could easily imagine it being possible for moderators to hand-curate the "Best of" view in the future.
There is also an "aggregated links" view that aggregates all of the outbound links from a thread and shows how many times they have been clicked on.
Discourse has moderator tools for "closing" threads. I would expect that closed threads would work well together with the "Best of" view.
Bring more structure than linear comments, but less complexity than threaded comments.
I think this is one of the team's highest priorities. There is some innovation in the way replies work, but it's also possible to "reply as a new thread", with margin links between the threads. I have found this to be a very good compromise, and something that explicitly attempts to tackle your desire here.
In short, I think there's more depth here than you're seeing at first glance, and the things you want to see from Discourse are things the team is actively thinking about.
Weak.
Definitely. I basically want a forum that looks like gitk (but flipped, obviously). Clear replies, multiple parents, but sorted chronologically and without indentation. Higher or lower rated posts could be marked typographically.
I don't know how well this would scale, though.
This. I'd like it on reddit. We have 7 years of back logs that just sit there.