| |
|
I'm interested to know which are the current state of the art in message board softwares around the place that you've seen.
Interesting question - because, primarily, most forums I'm on that aren't Barbelith are pretty much hell to use. I love the communities - and they use board functionality well, for instance, building "spoilers" functions into quotations, etc - but the software (PHPBB, vBulletin, etc) is all shit.
For me, the "state of the art" in forum software is the hyper-simple. So, by and large, Barbelith, but also something like Opinion, which looks like this:
http://fora.pragprog.com/rails-recipes
Opinion is hyper-simple, though, but it could easily be built open and extended.
For something more complex, but which places the appropriate emphasis on "content", Vanilla looks interesting:
http://lussumo.com/community/
though it has some unusual ideas/nomenclature.
And, of course, Barbelith, which I genuinely enjoy the process of using - it's simple and it's very fast. I get bored easily of slow, overcomplex, fiddly sites with tons of icons.
The thing almost nothing has, which Barbelith does, is the distributed moderation; I think that could easily be built into something like Opinion or even Vanilla, wheras building into the monstrosities that are vBulletin or the like would probably be hell. Barbelith is forum software built partly for the needs of its community, and also partly to fit an ideal of distributed moderation, which is why it's interesting - almost every other community I've ever been in starts with someone else's product.
I basically think that the process of using a board - find, post, search, PM (perhaps) - is relatively simple and should be kept that way. The administration and moderation are more complex, but ordinary users shouldn't have to deal with fiendish interfaces because there's so much going on.
It's why I like the simplicity of PM's here - the deliberate simplicity helps restrict their usage; you don't have a sent-box; you don't have endless nested quotes; it's more like passing pieces of paper around.
Regarding things requested so far - "last post by" is always easy to implement and very fast; counting numbers of posts can get slow (relatively speaking), and counting views can get very slow - if you're not careful - and might well need to be cached, which requires more complex thought, usually. Given the former is more useful, faster, and simpler, I'd consider supporting that idea. None of the ideas are impossible, but one thing that I like about Barbelith is the speed and simplicity, as mentioned above.
Tom - is any of that any use? I'd be interested in discussing that question more, possibly in a new thread. |
|
|
