General > General Technical Chat
Migrating the forum to Discourse
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magic:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 02, 2020, 04:16:01 am ---I've never liked threaded displays, it turns the a topic into a maze of little subtopics, it's one of the reasons I don't use reddit unless I happen to end up there from a search for something.

--- End quote ---
Or it becomes close to linear because everybody rushes to attach his post to the currently most-upvoted thread for visibility :-DD
tggzzz:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 02, 2020, 04:16:01 am ---
--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on April 01, 2020, 04:26:24 pm ---Not if it has a properly threaded display. Quotes are a bandaid because there is no threading. A typical web forum is pants in this context, and conversations here are rubbish. By contrast, with a threaded display a quote is pretty rare and only used to isolate a particular part of the post being commented on.

Here, a topic with 1000 posts is a huge beast, worthy of comment and boasting. On a threaded forum it would be nothing, yet every post would be relatable to the one it is a comment to and quoting wouldn't be needed.

--- End quote ---

I've never liked threaded displays, it turns the a topic into a maze of little subtopics, it's one of the reasons I don't use reddit unless I happen to end up there from a search for something.

--- End quote ---

I agree about reddit, but there are alternative displays that I prefer. I also like to be able to flick between linear and threaded with one click.

For example, here's a usenet topic started by Win Hill of AoE fame. It shows both threading and multilevel quoting, why they are orthogonal and both valuable

Nominal Animal:
Threading creates trees, but human communication is linear.

The result is that message threading encourages bifurcation from the original topic, whereas a linear/paged message listing only encourages divergence from the original topic.  In both cases, quoting has an orthogonal purpose, and can even be used to collect various posts back to the original topic.

In an ongoing discussion threading is extremely useful, exactly because of the bifurcation: each sub-discussion can concentrate on the details, and the communication is not restricted to a linear format.  However, reading those afterwards is slow, as it can be difficult to reconstruct the complete flow; you often have to read the entire related discussion linearly in posted order, to understand it all.

Thus, in my opinion, threading works best for email, and linear message listing (in posting order) for discussions read afterwards.

I personally avoid Discourse; it does not seem to work well the way I use my browser.  Granted, I particularly dislike web sites that insist on using async Javascript to load content, because I want the page to actually show the contents I want when I load it, and not sometime later on.  I don't mind if the images take some time to load, as long as the text is there from the get go.
tooki:

--- Quote from: amyk on March 30, 2020, 03:49:24 am ---I think vBulletin is pretty nice; look at https://www.badcaps.net/forum for an example.

--- End quote ---
I can vouch for vBulletin being a great platform. For many years, I was a (user, not server) admin on what was at the time the biggest Mac forum outside of Apple’s own. (As of today, despite it being a graveyard these days, with very little activity over the past decade, that forum has over twice as many total posts as the eevblog forums, and three times as many registered users, just to give some scale). We ran it with a totally custom skin we commissioned, with various custom mods. Feature wise, it’s a bit dated now, but the skin still looks great, far better than any default skin I’ve ever seen on any forum software. The forum skin was introduced in 2007, for context. If anyone cares, it’s still up, at http://forums.macnn.com, years after the MacNN news site shut down.)

I wasn’t a server admin, but my understanding is that the vBulletin company was very helpful in implementing the custom stuff, and with any server issues that came up. For sure, I can vouch for it being eminently capable of running a forum of this scale, both in terms of scalability and features. (PhpBB, for example, is far, far, far too feature-poor for larger communities.)
tggzzz:

--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on April 02, 2020, 11:58:39 am ---Threading creates trees, but human communication is linear.

The result is that message threading encourages bifurcation from the original topic, whereas a linear/paged message listing only encourages divergence from the original topic.  In both cases, quoting has an orthogonal purpose, and can even be used to collect various posts back to the original topic.

In an ongoing discussion threading is extremely useful, exactly because of the bifurcation: each sub-discussion can concentrate on the details, and the communication is not restricted to a linear format.  However, reading those afterwards is slow, as it can be difficult to reconstruct the complete flow; you often have to read the entire related discussion linearly in posted order, to understand it all.

--- End quote ---

It need not be slow, if multilevel quotes are used. Having the tree explicitly visible is a great help as well, as it visually separates subthreads.

It is all old technology known to the greybeards back in the mid 80s. Youngsters forget history.
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