MyBB Community Forums

Forums seem to offer more then a simple group.

(2014-06-26, 02:27 AM)Zash Wrote: [ -> ]Forums won't disappear anytime soon, but they will definitely continue to morph and change shape.

The current (old?) style of forum, like MyBB/XenForo/etc, with a very tabular structure is dying. And for good reason too - I've never found the structure or style to be very user friendly or intuitive to anyone that hasn't been exposed to forums for a while. Attempts to improve the UI, like on Harajuju, are very much needed improvements but seem to be an uphill battle against a legacy interface that needs to be scrapped altogether.

I think "Q/A" style forums are still doing great, and that's in part caused by the flexibility of the categories and the focus on fresh content rather than pages and pages of old information. This includes sites like Quora, StackExchange and software like Discourse. These do a better job of hiding inactivity, and provide a greater focus on the content. Discourse's "web app" style is also a move forward, though I think its kind of clunky right now.

I don't really find Discourse to be a move forward. Discourse doesn't even work on my laptop. It just completely whitescreens and it's not like I'm not running a cutting edge browser. Discourse is a joke which has overinvested in JavaScript without any fallbacks. A mistake which I hope MyBB 2.0 won't be making.

As for Discourse's theme.. It doesn't look too different from a generic forum theme. When you first visit it, you're greeted with a table filled with content and the posts are laid out in a very similar way to other forum software. I don't exactly see how they're innovating with the style itself.

Discourse really sucks. Like a perfect example of everything bad about modern web design.

(2014-07-26, 07:57 PM)brad-t Wrote: [ -> ]Discourse really sucks. Like a perfect example of everything bad about modern web design.

The problem with web apps is that it sounds like a good idea until, you actually use one of them. They are good for some things but, not for others.

I don't mind the idea of having an AJAX Loading system, assuming that there's a fallback (even if you have JavaScript on, it's not always the most reliable thing), it doesn't have infinite loading (the source of most of the problems in Discourse), it's not buggy like hell (looking at you here, Discourse) and that it's faster than just implementing regular loading (again, Discourse..).

The fundamental problem with Discourse is that it's built by people who didn't have any experience with running actual forums before, which made them even more susceptible to the "modern web app hype".
Some things like realtime loading sound impressive, but many forums are constrained by what feature sets are financially viable for the administrators.

Quote:Ruby is a decent performer, but you really need to throw fast hardware at it for good performance. Yeah, I know, interpreted languages are what they are, and caching, database, network, blah blah blah. Still, we obtained the absolute fastest CPUs you could buy for the Discourse servers, 4.0 Ghz Ivy Bridge Xeons, and performance is just … good on today's fastest hardware. Not great. Good.

Quoted from the founder of Discourse.
This seems to assume that administrators would have expensive high-end hardware to throw at their problems. Web apps can be very demanding.
I'm not saying that you would need this sort of hardware for most forums, but it shows that they're already having to resort to using this sort of hardware for their forums.

For a software with a release "right around the corner", Discourse still feels as unstable as it did six months ago.
It doesn't always remember where I am on the infinite page. It doesn't work on my laptop, at all. If you disable JavaScript then, all you see is an archive for crawlers which you can't interact with.

Aside from bugginess, I just find Discourse's UI totally inscrutable. What the hell is this?

I do not think they will ever die out. You will always have people who are interested in certain things, and those who like to communicate online in these forums.

(2014-07-27, 01:13 AM)zinsavage123 Wrote: [ -> ]I do not think they will ever die out. You will always have people who are interested in certain things, and those who like to communicate online in these forums.

People are already communicating a bunch about their interests without using forums, bub.

To be honest, I think that Facebook will probably collapse. They're just prodding their users more and more and more.
As for forums, who knows. I doubt that it'll be FB that kills them though. FB Groups are fairly inadequate for replacing forums. Twitter is even less suitable for that and does Google+ have a groups system?


By the way, this is what Discourse looks like with JavaScript disabled. Isn't it beautiful?
This is probably how it'll show up on Google.

(2014-07-27, 09:55 PM)Axareal Wrote: [ -> ]To be honest, I think that Facebook will probably collapse. They're just prodding their users more and more and more.

Delusional. Facebook is stronger than it's ever been and will certainly find ways to fix whatever problems they encounter in the near future. They're now a company, not a service, so even if Facebook the service goes down, they'll certainly have a replacement prepared.

Friendly reminder that Facebook has over one billion users.

Quote:By the way, this is what Discourse looks like with JavaScript disabled. Isn't it beautiful?

Who cares? This is like worrying about people using IE6.

(2014-07-27, 10:16 PM)brad-t Wrote: [ -> ]

(2014-07-27, 09:55 PM)Axareal Wrote: [ -> ]To be honest, I think that Facebook will probably collapse. They're just prodding their users more and more and more.

Delusional. Facebook is stronger than it's ever been and will certainly find ways to fix whatever problems they encounter in the near future. They're now a company, not a service, so even if Facebook the service goes down, they'll certainly have a replacement prepared.

Friendly reminder that Facebook has over one billion users.

Quote:By the way, this is what Discourse looks like with JavaScript disabled. Isn't it beautiful?

Who cares? This is like worrying about people using IE6.

As a little note, Facebook seems to be buying out many of it's competitors for insane prices.
It mainly relies on investors to fund it and investors want returns. With how much they spend, they will have to bring in quite a lot of money from the users.

Worrying about IE6? When Discourse breaks or you encounter one of it's many flaws (like breaking browser functionality. Zoom, CTRL+F, etc.), which happens fairly frequently, the main solution is to disable JavaScript and you get greeted by this. With v1.0 around the corner, this seems like a terribly flawed product.

If it actually did what it was supposed to then, it would be less of a problem although, it has many flaws layered on top which don't help either.