Joel on Community Forums 76
Evil Grinn writes "In Building Communities with Software, Joel Spolsky starts with a lament about the lack of real-life community among programmers, but rapidly seques into an explanation of why he thinks his own forum system is better than Usenet or Slashdot. I really don't participate in Joel's forums enough to comment, but they are pretty basic. No registration system. No branching (you can only add comments to the end of a conversation, not reply to comments in the middle). No mod points. Quoting in replies is strongly discouraged. All of these are part of the design of the system, not missing features."
I disagree with many of his assertions.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot is a very different type of community since there really aren't any persistent "boards" or discussion forums -- the forums are the articles and they last a very short period of time. This is fine -- slashdot is about "news for nerds" after all.
When I spend time at other forums, I want most of the features that were removed. I agree quoting can go too far, but most boards I've been on don't seem to fall prey to to this like email messages easily can.
I like threaded discussions, but not everyone does. I've noticed some systems (i.e. ubb.threads) have some nice technology that allows the user to switch between them.
Overall, this article wasn't too interesting. I'd rather see an article that reviewed a number of the different community systems out there (ahem -- how about looking at my story submission someone???)...
Is there discussion locking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there locking for posting in-depth, correct, messages, or if you spend lots of time presenting a well thought out post do you just get bounced when somebody else has already replied while you were typing? You can't restrict branching in a high traffic forum without some sort of syncronization, and you can't allow syncronization to be open to untrusted users without denial of service. Sounds like a broken decision to me.
Re:Voting with our feet (Score:3, Interesting)
Community, not forums (Score:2, Interesting)
What's he on? (Score:2, Interesting)
"On IRC, you can't own your nickname and you can't own a channel -- once the last person leaves a room, anyone can take it over. "
Bullshit. That's not a feature of _IRC_, that's a particular feature of the particular irc net he's using. Many smaller networks have nameservs, so that you can own your nickname, and it's also perfectly possible to have registered channel management on an IRC network too.
His criticisms of Usenet and the '>' disease are equally bogus. It's _idiots_ who don't know how to trim quotes, and idiots can make any system annoying. The higher quality newsgroups tend to slap good posting style into newbs fairly swiftly, and you therefore don't read the same thing repeatedly.
If he believes his system is inherantly superior, then perhaps we shoudl all run over, and act like annoying newbs on his fora, and he'd soon see that his setup is just as flawed as any other, if not more-so.
YAW.
Can someone remind me... (Score:3, Interesting)
...why it is always front-page news here when Joel S. opens his mouth? Is someone who runs Slashdot pals with him or something? He seems to be about as astute about software as, well, your general slashdotter...which is just kinda okay really (I mean, his ideas aren't always terrible, sometimes their good, sometimes stupid and bad. I'd rather hear from, say, Bruce Shneier though, to pick another random qualified software-pundit). I don't get it.
I help run a successful forum (Score:3, Interesting)
Within a really good community you can let the community keep itself in order. When someone steps out of line or a newbie does something... newbieish... then the community straightens it out before a moderator needs to step in.
To create strong community you must create a strong friendship, or at least a strong commonality, among members.
Re:My pet peeve (Score:3, Interesting)
When I wrote a forum/news webapp, my boss said he wanted it like zdnet's comments. So I set up his personal preferences to look like it: flat, unthreaded, oldest first, expand thresholds set so that no comments were expanded till selected. He could have done it himself but well he's the boss
A colleague wandered to Slashdot and didn't get it. Didn't understand how to use the site. It's not that obvious for some reason.
Kuro5hin (Score:1, Interesting)
My own guess would be three factors:
(1) The community written and edited stories with following plebiscite seems draw people in. Users want to participate, and they come to associate the views with the writers. They take more pride in a cite that is truly community built, in part by them.
(2) The comment moderation system allows people to become known. Since any user can rate any comment at any time -- and his name is attached to the rating -- users become known. Also, this fosters user participation because people are not limited to either writing comments or moderating.
(3) The continuously scrolling diary section creates a valve for outbursts or simply a location to write about qoutidian life. It has generated a subculture of its own.
Re:Missing Features (Score:2, Interesting)
In this case, the rationale of these choices is to guide the development of the community, from how people interact with it, to how people participate in it, to which people even both with it at all. In glancing though the article, Slashdot is mentioned several times, generally as a compare/contrast example. There's no question that Slashdot works (and works well, in my opinion), but there are definitely some characteristics that could definitely be improved. I'm sure that the Joel on Software forum works as well, but in a slightly different way.
And I'm equally sure that other forum implementations don't work for sh!t, but they manage to get lots of participation anyway (most of which is a waste of electrons that could be better spent lighting an empty closet). Then again, I don't waste my time with those, which is a fine example of design choices influencing the community.