What's wrong with forums?

[rusty105]

Wow.. you guys really pushed this to far.. but you forget the essential.

Whats wrong with forums?

Look around.. almost all forum software is outdated, almost all forum software require users to register. Users are lazy, when comes to registration they go away. We are not anymore in 1990. Most of peoples have hard time to remember Facebook password.. put them to register on 10 forums, and they will say no thanks instant.

I know users who will want to join some kind of discussion, but when comes to registration they just give up.

Look at Disqus or Livefyre how successful and dynamic they are.. why? Because they offer single sign on. SSO everywhere, and problem will be solved.

Again, I blame most of forum software for poor implementation/options to bring users fast in the action.

This days is all about integration, first hand, peoples don't have time with so many attractions/things to do.

Single sign on ?

yeah, a phrase comes to mind. "...and one to compromise them all..." butchered from "The Lord of the Rings" Trilogy. original was

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

My point being, if you value your privacy and security why in earth would you use only one password for everything. It is the first thing they tell you NOT to do. SSO is NOT the answer, in my eyes. other then that, what else is so outdated with forums?

 

[UXP]

I'll be honest with all of you and say that I hope you all do give up on forums. That leaves more room for me HAHA

The problem with forums is the over saturation of them. Some people like to over think.
In order to compete you must offer something different from all of your competitors or else you will come in here asking "what's wrong with forums?".

SkepticGuy runs one of the largest (if not the largest) Alternative Topics forum on the internet. They started out on a free forum host and moved on from there. I was there all those years ago. Today they recoded the XMB forum (please correct me if I am mistaken) and created an entirely new forum system that in the looks department beats 99% of others that I have seen, in and out of that field. He knows what he is taking about and many of you should pay attention to what he has to offer in terms of experience and success.

 

[computerology]

Probably the best examples of this are content databases or wikis. Forums just can't organize content in that way, and as a result anyone who attempts to store lots of different information in threads or stickies will ultimately just create a pointless mess.

This is the point that I have been trying to drive home exactly. I find it somewhat both amusing and also pathetically illustrative that it is even being debated that forums are somehow great ways of storing content for users. Any forum admin who's been around a while has done it, and as it scales upwards you end up in this crazy pointless mess where your trying to use the forums for content. I think the lesson learned from this is that a lot of forum admins are just too balls deep invested in the forum software format because they understand it (and they may not understand the other types of CMS/content engines out there).

Can forums store content? Yeah, I guess so but not very well at all. Can the kind of discussion that forums are designed to facilitate be classified as content? Well yes, sometimes it can but the majority of it boils down to conversations and quotes making things desperately hard to find if you havent been monitoring the board and the threads regularly.

That sounds like a nightmare to manage. A different interface for every content type? So rather than just choosing the topic I want to talk about, I have to figure out which interface goes with what I want to say?

No silly. The interface is intuitively presented to the user based on the content type. In the forum area it is a list of topics and replies like you would see in a standard forum area. If you are looking at a video it displays a different subset of information such as tags and you can "comment" on it rather than seeing a list of topics and having to click inside to see whats in there. If you are reviewing an article you can give it a rating in stars, share it to social networks, or click on a tag about some of the topics included in the article and find other articles which contain references to the same topic.

Quite the contrary it is not a nightmare to manage at all - compared to forums it's a dream to manage. You set up content types, and then you set up how those content types will display to the user, any specialized fields that should go with the content type (say a "event" content type will have a start time, finish time, and location for example), and then what the user sees is everything relevant to the content type and when a user adds content they see a list of fields to make the content easier to manage, sort, retreive and display.

Now if you take a look at how people try to manage these kind of things in forums, its a disastrous mess. A forum where people regularly post events (say a rave party website for example) and the admins have to rigorously enforce tags in the titles like "[Party][City][Date] Event Name" because it drives users absolutely nuts to have clicked on the title "Event Name" only to find out it is happening hundreds or thousands of miles away. Maybe you can use these things for search but again users are users and only the most loyal of users will even know that they're supposed to use the tags in the title, leaving admins and mods to clean it up on a regular basis.

I think that maybe you need to do a few test installs of some real CMS software and play around with it a bit so you can grasp some of these concepts. I am not trying to be condescending or get into a competition with you at all so dont take this statement that way; but your ignorance of how the various CMS engines work under the hood seems to be driving your line of questioning which is kind of driving me a bit insane. You are swearing up and down that the forum board format is good for organizing and retreiving a variety of content types and that using another format is a make work project. You really need to see a few good CMSes under the hood to grasp it then you'll understand.

What happens if someone posts a question in the area for static content? Or posts a video in the forum?

Static-type content (say an article for example) is moderated in almost all cases. The admin's job is to ensure that static content is of good enough quality (either by editing the user's submission or by rejecting it) and to manage what appears on the homepage, clean up the tags, etc. In your example of where they ask a question; I would suggest to the user that they post that in the forums and reject the submission.

In your second example I would request that the user resubmit the video to the video content type and give them instructions, or maybe just submit it myself and suggest that they do it that way next time and delete their post and advise them of whats happened so they dont feel slighted.

However especially in your second example that probably wouldnt really happen. If a user is looking at videos and hits submit they are automatically going to submit the correct content type because it's intuitive to the user that they will want to be in the videos section to submit a video. Users have varying skill levels and your always going to get the guy who submits a forum-type post as an article or a video in a forum post, but the intuitiveness of the engine and the organization of content by type and format should lead them naturally to submit content in the right place.

I'm still having trouble following this. How is the content different if you take it out of a forum post and put in a static page? All you've done is taken away the opportunity for discussion, so why have a forum at all? Why not simply move to a blog-type system completely and post "articles" for others to comment on? You say leave the forum stuff in forums. But anything of value, you want as static content. That means the forums aren't providing value, so what's the point of having them?

Again you need to look under the hood and try out some decent CMS software. CMS software and a blog are entirely different things. A blog tends to be more single-author with comments only, you have to get out of this "blog" box.

For example, on my site every user gets their own blog, their blog entries are a content type that is associated with that user. Users can look up so and so's blog entries and get a list of what that person is talking about as part of their profile. There is also a forum with posts and replies having their own content types as well. There is an articles section, videos section, and these also have their own content types and can be found if the user is looking for these using menu items, tags, or both.

Where users are getting bored is that discussion for discussions sake is getting boring, tired, and old. Forums are not new to virtually anyone now, and most of the users that you want to attract have seen the same old flame wars, flame bait, soap boxing, and other annoying antics in forums. People dont mind discussion, but they want to talk about SOMETHING rather than just talking for the sake of talking. Theres still going to be some of that but your community does not revolve around people constantly checking your forums to see what everyone is saying anymore.

If someone sees a video that they like, they may want to comment on it. The poster may answer that comment with their own comment. Then they may submit another video. The "community" is no longer just who's talking on the forum board. This paradigm I beleive is tripping you up. Any activity on your site amongst users is your community. Whether they are commenting on an article, a video, or submitting their own blog entry, or uploading pictures, posting an event to share or promote, trying to sell a second hand product or trying to promote a commercial venture.

The key is that a forum is great for facilitating discussion - not for organizing content.

Take a look at craigslist. Theres a huge user base there, they post ads. Imagine putting all that crap onto a forum board! Craigslist organizes the ads into categories with each category having a variety of content types. Rentals have a rental range and square footage. Jobs have employment types like full time, part time, contract, etc. Users can search the ads for a place that costs $800 a month and is at least 4000 square feet. They also have a forum which is kind of awful; but it gets really well used. People dont come to craigslist to yak in the forums, they come for the classified ads. But then they get sucked in, they want to make a post about a horrible experience, or how to avoid a scam, or to ask whats wrong with their rental ad from other advertisers to see if they can improve their performance. Over time, they formed a community, a community of craigslist users. Without the ads they would have never attracted people to the forums. If the content was all in the forums it would be a nightmare to find anything and nobody would use the site and they'd all be on kijiji or using newspaper classifieds like the old days.

You need to grab a few of the better CMS packages and take a look under the hood for a while. I can tell your a smart cookie and all; it's just hard to explain how they work because you arent able to visualize the concepts we're trying to present to you, you keep coming back to how a forum can do that just fine. Sure you CAN post pictures in a forum post, but isnt an image gallery a better vehicle? Sure you CAN post events in a forum area for events, but isnt it better to put them into a calendar? Sure you CAN put real meaty content in a forum post, but isnt it better to have your content sortable by topic, tag, and menu item so your users can find it later after it's fallen into the netherworld of the third page?

The icky-sticky mess of trying to organize content in forums is the reason why forums are not attractive and users are turning to them less and less.

Break out of the box.

 

[drt3]

I'm not sure those services for content sites are apt comparisons in this case. There's no community aspect, and there have been complaints of quality issues (vulgarities, etc.).

I actually think the contrary. By example using an OpenID, you are forced somehow to don't ruin you OpenID reputation across boards.

I see Sceptic got here first but I'll add to his comments. It isn't laziness that's holding people back from registering. It's their perception of the value they will receive for making the effort to register. So you need to give them something that makes the effort of registering worth while.

Single sign on ?

yeah, a phrase comes to mind. "...and one to compromise them all..." butchered from "The Lord of the Rings" Trilogy. original was

My point being, if you value your privacy and security why in earth would you use only one password for everything. It is the first thing they tell you NOT to do. SSO is NOT the answer, in my eyes. other then that, what else is so outdated with forums?

You guys missed what I said seems.. There are a lot of forums, users will probable want to join some discussions some times.. registering is not hard, but is ANOTHER password to remember.. not everybody use password tools.

Of course.. is just another password. And then come another password, and so on.. Using SSO simply eliminate that problem. Not counting activation steps.

I've seen Disqus and Livefyre how dynamic they are. Why? Very simple, is so easy to join the discussion. No activation, no another password.

Aside the forum content/quality/etc. Lets say everything is perfect. Offering SSO does not hurt at all. Sadly only a few forum software do it now. But the trend is on seems. And frankly, if you get spammers, you get with or without SSO. Nothing will stop them. But that feature is not for them, is for possible users, to give them a fast way to join.

Oh, and about quality of content... something comes in my mind.. how you plan to educate the users to make quality content? There are peoples and peoples.. you can't force IQ check before joining the board of anything else like that, because, is called discrimination. Forum is forum, everybody have opinions. Is not your book.

 

[TrixieTang]

Oh, and about quality of content... something comes in my mind.. how you plan to educate the users to make quality content? There are peoples and peoples.. you can't force IQ check before joining the board of anything else like that, because, is called discrimination. Forum is forum, everybody have opinions. Is not your book.

"My site, my rules." A lot of us try to avoid saying it because we don't want to be seen as dictators or something, but in the end it's the truth.

If I want to ban members who I think are complete morons then I can, it's not "discrimination" and it's perfectly legal. In fact I've seen one forum before that makes members post a thread about why should be allowed to be a member, if they don't do it or if the admins don't think that they're the right kind of member then they never get their account activated.

I'm not saying that it's right for everyone or every forum, but there's really nothing wrong with it.

 

[Nev_Dull]

You guys missed what I said seems.. There are a lot of forums, users will probable want to join some discussions some times.. registering is not hard, but is ANOTHER password to remember.. not everybody use password tools.

Aside the forum content/quality/etc. Lets say everything is perfect. Offering SSO does not hurt at all. Sadly only a few forum software do it now. But the trend is on seems. And frankly, if you get spammers, you get with or without SSO. Nothing will stop them. But that feature is not for them, is for possible users, to give them a fast way to join.

You don't have to use a password manager. Almost all forum software has the ability to remember passwords. All it takes is one click of a box. I can't recall the last time I actually logged in to any of the forums I read. That said, you are right about adding OpenID or similar. It adds another way for users to get into your site and doesn't affect those who choose not to use it.

Oh, and about quality of content... something comes in my mind.. how you plan to educate the users to make quality content? There are peoples and peoples.. you can't force IQ check before joining the board of anything else like that, because, is called discrimination. Forum is forum, everybody have opinions. Is not your book.

It's all down to the forum's editorial policy. Quality content doesn't mean every post has to be Shakespeare. It does mean that every post has to be relevant to the thread. Sceptic Guy's example was a good one: someone who responds by quoting the entire post and adding "That's true" or "I agree", has done nothing to enhance or forward the discussion. He hasn't provided quality content.

 

[Phil_Tanny]

It isn't laziness that's holding people back from registering. It's their perception of the value they will receive for making the effort to register. So you need to give them something that makes the effort of registering worth while.

Right, it's our job to provide a good signal to noise ratio. Perhaps the problem is that we're not willing to do that?

We seem not to be willing to reward the higher quality posters with anything meaningful.

We seem not to be willing to somehow discourage or get rid of the lower quality posters, because that is evil dictatorial censorship etc.

Perhaps the problem is that we refuse to decide who our audience is, and then serve that audience?

If our audience is the higher quality posters, we need to find a way to make the signal to noise ratio more appealing. That is, we have to somehow limit, manage, or get rid of the low quality posters.

If our audience is the lower quality posters, then we should further relax the standards, rules and signup obstacles, and make peace with the logical outcome of the "anybody can say anything" model.

Many human problems boil down to some version of "I want my cake and eat it too". Perhaps this is one of those?

 

[SkepticGuy]

Oh, and about quality of content... something comes in my mind.. how you plan to educate the users to make quality content?

That's where the community culture takes hold. A discussion board that has evolved a culture/society where the majority of members have a high degree of community pride is one where quality content is most likely to emerge.

There are peoples and peoples.. you can't force IQ check before joining the board of anything else like that, because, is called discrimination.

I'm fine with discrimination, we do it all the time.

We discriminate against those who take part in gratuitous arguments and flame wars.

We discriminate against those who like to use vulgarities.

We discriminate against those who want to discuss their drug habits.

...etc...

Forum is forum, everybody have opinions. Is not your book.

It is ours, and we protect it vigorously for the benefit of our members.

 

[TrixieTang]

We seem not to be willing to reward the higher quality posters with anything meaningful.

I've always rewarded the best quality posters with a special VIP/supporter status.

Perhaps the problem is that we refuse to decide who our audience is, and then serve that audience?

Or too many of us just don't realize that we need a target audience. I think a lot of admins go into the game with the whole "more members means a better forum" idea.

I know that I started my first forum and tried targetting all anime/manga/videogame fans. The end result was that most members ended up being less-than-serious off-topic chit-chatters and I ultimately realized that the type of forum it became wasn't the type of forum that I wanted to run.

We seem not to be willing to somehow discourage or get rid of the lower quality posters, because that is evil dictatorial censorship etc.

If our audience is the higher quality posters, we need to find a way to make the signal to noise ratio more appealing. That is, we have to somehow limit, manage, or get rid of the low quality posters.

For my next forum I plan on having much stricter rules against low quality garbage and derailing. Anyone who has a habit of crapping up the place will find themselves banned pretty quickly.

A lot of us think that members should matter more than ourselves or that we should even try to run our forums as democracies, but we often forget that if we don't like where the members take things then we may actually find ourselves being the ones wanting to leave.

 

[drt3]

"My site, my rules." A lot of us try to avoid saying it because we don't want to be seen as dictators or something, but in the end it's the truth.

That's not related to discrimination, is related to forum rules, every one of us I think agree here.

That's where the community culture takes hold. A discussion board that has evolved a culture/society where the majority of members have a high degree of community pride is one where quality content is most likely to emerge.

Totally agree here.

I'm fine with discrimination, we do it all the time.

We discriminate against those who take part in gratuitous arguments and flame wars.

We discriminate against those who like to use vulgarities.

We discriminate against those who want to discuss their drug habits.

...etc...

I think that's called "order", order related to forum rules. And of course I agree with that too. (I am not quite sure if I should name it discrimination here)

@Kotonoha
@SkepticGuy

Lets look on a "imaginary" technical forum. Most of users come to get answers, in terms of quality of content, the forum is pure trash. The point it, from all trash, there are things to learn for some users, at different levels. What's not quality for me, can be for some one else.

I mean, is pretty hard to judge the quality with out be subjective.

Sure, the strict forum rules, helps forum to going in the wrong directions, but that's kinda all you can do about the content.

Banning one user there, another there, don't solve the problem. I think is better to try to educate them some how, if you want to keep them.

 

[Phil_Tanny]

For my next forum I plan on having much stricter rules against low quality garbage and derailing. Anyone who has a habit of crapping up the place will find themselves banned pretty quickly.

Perhaps it's helpful for the forum owner to more clearly define for themselves what "low quality garbage" is.

More to the point, how would quality posters (those members we wish we had more of) define "low quality garbage"? What kind of content will discourage the higher quality posters we want?

There's an existing pretty broad consensus among forum admins against a certain set of behaviors such as self promotion, name calling, flame wars, porn, etc.

The problem seems to be that it's entirely possible to diligently delete all such posts and posters, and still have a forum over flowing with low quality writing that will bore, annoy and otherwise discourage those posters we wish we had more of.

Perhaps we need to squarely face the fact that a great number of posters are perfectly nice people who are good forum citizens, but they just don't have that much of anything interesting to say, and they don't really know how to say what they can contribute.

Perhaps we should distinguish between those forum members who are engaging in anti-social behaviors, and those members who just aren't willing or able to serve the needs of the kind of quality posters we hope to attract to our forum.

Most of us seem to largely agree on what to do with trolls and spammers etc.

But what about those who are filling our forum with inarticulate empty content? This seems to be the bigger and trickier problem.

A lot of us think that members should matter more than ourselves or that we should even try to run our forums as democracies, but we often forget that if we don't like where the members take things then we may actually find ourselves being the ones wanting to leave.

Yes, good point! I agree that's a common problem. The forum owner gets bored with their own forum, melts in to the background, stops really caring that much about the content, and things slide downhill from there.

 

[Nev_Dull]

I am not trying to be condescending or get into a competition with you at all so dont take this statement that way; but your ignorance of how the various CMS engines work under the hood seems to be driving your line of questioning which is kind of driving me a bit insane. You are swearing up and down that the forum board format is good for organizing and retreiving a variety of content types and that using another format is a make work project. You really need to see a few good CMSes under the hood to grasp it then you'll understand.

I appreciate your continued efforts. And don't worry, I don't get offended easily.

Here's the thing. This discussion is about what's wrong with forums, not what's great about Drupal. I understand you've made the choice to use that software for your site and I hope it works out for you. However, that choice doesn't help with understanding the issues with forums. My questions and comments are intended, not to irritate you, but to focus on problems with forums. So when you make sweeping statements to the effect that forums can't be used to store content, I have to question them, especially given the fact there are many forums with years of archived threads that get searched and used every day.

 

[Nev_Dull]

Perhaps the problem is that we refuse to decide who our audience is, and then serve that audience?

Yes, that is something that would-be admins seem to overlook completely. You only have to read through a few posts in the Getting Started area here to see that most people start forums for themselves.

 

[Nev_Dull]

Lets look on a "imaginary" technical forum. Most of users come to get answers, in terms of quality of content, the forum is pure trash. The point it, from all trash, there are things to learn for some users, at different levels. What's not quality for me, can be for some one else.

I mean, is pretty hard to judge the quality with out be subjective.

Sure, the strict forum rules, helps forum to going in the wrong directions, but that's kinda all you can do about the content.

Banning one user there, another there, don't solve the problem. I think is better to try to educate them some how, if you want to keep them.

There's no magic bullet to get quality content. You can't just make a rule on your forum, then sit back and watch the good content roll in. It takes constant vigilance and a lot of hard work in every facet of your forum. However, if you do work at it diligently and consistently, you can improve the overall quality of the content, even on your imaginary trashy tech site. All it takes is time and effort.

 

[Nev_Dull]

But what about those who are filling our forum with inarticulate empty content? This seems to be the bigger and trickier problem.

I don't think it's tricky at all. But it does take some planning and a lot of hard work on the part of the admin. Unfortunately, those are two things that a lot of wanna-be forum admins don't seem willing to consider.

 

[Judge Dredd]

IMO, the biggest thing replacing forums are social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. And the reason being is that they are instant forums anyway.

 

[Jack1]

IMO, the biggest thing replacing forums are social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. And the reason being is that they are instant forums anyway.

This is basically what I said earlier in the thread

Another thing I'd add is that there are usually plenty of forums for each niche. For example, in my niche there are around fifteen forums I'd say and the oldest of those has been going since early-2003 and now has around 18,000 members. I started my forum in February of this year and have managed, through hard work, to get 220 members so far.

The simple thing is: there are too many forums and in general, once people are on one forum in a certain niche, they can't be bothered switching to another forum.

 

[Nev_Dull]

The simple thing is: there are too many forums and in general, once people are on one forum in a certain niche, they can't be bothered switching to another forum.

There's another good example to show that "common sense" is not very common. When there is an established, well-run, popular forum in a niche, I don't understand why people who try to start another similar forum are so surprised that it doesn't succeed.

There is a problem with saturation but it isn't that there are too many forums. It's that there are too many bad forums with no specific audience and no real purpose other than to exist.

 

[Librarian2000]

There's another good example to show that "common sense" is not very common. When there is an established, well-run, popular forum in a niche, I don't understand why people who try to start another similar forum are so surprised that it doesn't succeed.

There is a problem with saturation but it isn't that there are too many forums. It's that there are too many bad forums with no specific audience and no real purpose other than to exist.

In many niches - especially very specialized ones - the vast majority of forums are exactly as described above and I'll add more - they exist only because the new forum owner decided they didn't like something about about the older board. And my own observation is that what they didn't like was being told they had to abide by the rules of the first forum. And those rules were things like no flaming, no telling other posters what to think or write or whatever, no invasion of privacy, no posting of copyrighted material.

As for comparing forums to other social media - On Facebook, etc. those are your friends and family. So how do you find like-minded people in your hobby or professional interest? Not among your buddies on Facebook and Twitter. You look for a club or a forum (an on-line club). And you contribute to the ones where you get feedback or there are interesting conversations happening.

 

[Jura]

There's a lot of junk on social sites. While forums come in all sorts, they often have heavy rules or poor methods of moderation. A few bad experiences or coming from a mindless site to a forum could lead to various mindsets towards foruming.

I joined a Vocaloid forum last week (I don't really join forums anymore), made two posts, and left after one was deleted without any reason or broken rules. Having personal and "many" sites is how I prefer the Internet and hope it stays as, but some people are really not doing forums a favor.