That helps! Thanks!
It only works on one “level”, so it still makes it difficult to follow “threads” - but it does help for replies that are just one “level” deep.
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Just found myself coming directly to the forums skipping BB out completely… that is probably not what they had it mind…
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I believe @sam is working on addressing that issue:
http://meta.discourse.org/t/small-avatar-in-in-reply-to-box/8761/4?u=ajarn
yay!
Wow. I guess I need to check the BBS for non-BoingBoing discussions more often. I missed seeing this and now it probably won’t get read. But I like to here myself type, so hear it goes.
I don’t mind the new system. I find it harder to follow a conversation of two or more people going back and forth - but it is still possible. I do think they do a disservice to themselves not having the comments show up below the article. It used to be I would skim any of the comments of an article, as one might be something I want to reply to. Now if the topic doesn’t directly prompt me to reply, I usually don’t bother checking the comments. I believe that may be one reason for the apparent decrease in over all posts.
I have to say I am surprised that Antinous left with out a note. Love 'im or hate 'im, he was definitely a big part of how the comments section was run and how it flowed.
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You just need to ditch BB and start at BBS instead. It’s a bit bass-ackward, but there you go.
After a while it almost feels like BB again. Almost.
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Seems like the whole point of the BBS is to deliberately isolate commentary from posts and as a result any criticism of the BB staff becomes less visible.
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This is a deliberate decision by the team, I am having trouble finding the source but the gist is that we tried an automatic algorithm but the editors were unhappy. BB staff need to “like” comments for them to appear in the main BB article.
Any criticism, even fairly worded, was removed anyway.
He wasn’t the most impartial of mods, and I disagreed with him here and there, but I miss him anyway.
I hope he starts posting again.
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Yeah, but how many posts did they have on the older system? How many did I have? Looks like hardly any, right? But I’ve been around here for years.
You might try starting a meta topic if you have specific criticism. Now that the community has its own “place”, constructive criticism can live here in dedicated topics rather than cluttering up other discussions, yes?
It’s more likely to be a side effect of the main blog being in PHP and the bbs being actively developed in Ruby. I wouldn’t assume malevolence when there’s any number of perfectly feasible technical explanations.
Besides, if the BB staff wanted to reduce the visibility of criticism they’d just delete your post. But Xeni, at least, is more likely to just tell you to ‘eat a bag of dicks’. God, I nearly fell on the floor laughing when she told that guy off!
Just to point out, the Disqus comment system was written in python, and the Discourse system can speak JUST fine to PHP based blogging platforms without too much hard work.
This was an editorial decision, not a technical one.
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I was thinking that the host where discourse is being developed is probably a different environment (i.e. latest versions of Ruby & Rails, perhaps?) from the nice stable host where the wordpress-based PHP lives. But again I am just guessing; it’s simply easier for me to believe that BB has technical reasons for the separation than that there is some unnecessarily complex censorship conspiracy going on. Rob and Dean are not notably advocates of unnecessary complexity in my experience.
But anyway I refuse to believe disqus can do anything “just fine”. Disqus is the work of the devil! Avaunt ye, heretic!
I’m not glad to hear it. Antinous was a real presence here.
I do hope someone other than Sam and coding horror take over the moderation.
Hey Coding Horror,
I think the community never got a clear explanation of what was going on here to begin with. I think if someone had said, “Hey, this guy who was a founder of StackOverflow and StackExchange wants to transform forum software and he wants our help.” the BB comment community would have taken to it much faster.
I’d like to recommend to Beschizza that he do an interview with you guys and explore what is going on here in a little depth. It is interesting as a story and a story about crowd sourced intelligence. Which is a BoingBoing specialty, no?
Good luck.
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I agree, but I get the impression that many of the features of Discourse have been modified or negated here. The being able to see edits, for example… and other such things from stock Discourse. I don’t think we’re getting CodingHorror’s exact ideal implementation.
Now, Jeff, correct me if I’m wrong… but the point of Discourse is to create discussion and invoke a self-moderated type of environment through use of the same controls and methods that StackExchange uses, right? That when we get likes, loves, or replies or links or something (i haven’t peered into the code there too much) that it builds a karma score that then grants us more and more powers to help guide the community. Thus good contributors “bubble up” to positions of greater import and this can raise the quality of discussion.
I may be wrong, but that was my impression of what Discourse’s homepage seems to want.
And I don’t know if that fits in with what Boing Boing wants us to be over here.
I do think it is taking off. Discussions last for days now and stay interesting for the most part.
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I think the topic title is wrong.
When disqus was initiated, the quality of discussion instantly plummeted for the following reasons:
-
People no longer had to care enough to create a BB account - which was often difficult and error-prone in the prior systems, it took me five tries because I was using a heavily secured browser. Instead, you just used your existing Google account or whatever. This removed a (rather fickle) barrier to entry so BB started getting less insular and more subject to drive-bys.
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Because it allowed multiple authentication and identification sources, disqus let people engage in massive sock-puppetry. I have around ten valid disqus IDs, personally, although like most people I don’t misuse them (with one exception, to prove a point about disqus). Antinous used to seek out and destroy sock-puppets under the older forum systems, Disqus ended that.
-
Because the new system was so radically different, it was more difficult for the moderators to do their jobs. Disemvowelling (which I loved, and which really contributed to the formation of this community) was done manually under the old system (I offered to automate it, but Dean has no reason to trust my coding skillz) and proved to be far too much for the mods to continue in addition to dealing with the normal site traffic and the new requirements of disqus.
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Because of points 1 & 2, people could use their multiple accounts to flag posts that they disagreed with and get them removed without moderator intervention. This created secret moderators who acted to suppress ideas outside the groupthink of the community (something disemvowelling didn’t do, since you could puzzle out the objectionable material if you wanted to, while removing it from casual view).
The faults of discourse fall principally in the same buckets as those of disqus. I do not think that the discussion quality has suffered in any way with the introduction of discourse, although I do fear the departure of Antinous will have negative effects. He certainly kept me in line… and was remarkably fair about it, despite our sometimes vehement differences of opinion.
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