I thought the meta category was for topics that were about the BBS system itself?
Shouldnāt there be a ācommunityā category for topics from the community?
BB category stories from the main site
meta category for items related to the BBS system itself
Community category for stories from the community.
Thereās the http://bbs.boingboing.net/category/uncategorized board too
Iām not really liking the BBS.
On one hand, I miss having the comments on the same page as the story. I basically never read the comments anymore. On the other hand, the signal-to-noise ratio in the comments was pretty high that when I did read the comments, I didnāt get much out of them.
Discourse is very nice forum software, but I think itās a lousy commenting system. The separation between the story and community interaction is too great. Itās clumsy and on small screen devices, almost unusable.
Iād be curious to hear what you and the other rulers of BoingBoing think about the state of your community engagement. It seems to me that a significant portion of that engagement takes place away from your servers entirely on social media sites. Is the BBS section worth the time and energy that it takes to maintain?
Why keep comments at all? In the past month, has anything happened here that you can point to and say āand thatās why we, unlike many other sites, still have commentsā? If you got rid of them, would your traffic, reputation, or revenues be harmed? A significant number of your stories are links to other sites and often those other sites are more appropriate locations for commenting anyway. Why not just assign a hashtag to stories and let the community do with it what they will?
This comment sounds snarky, but thatās not my intention. Iāve been a daily visitor to BoingBoing since the beginning and appreciate all the work you guys do.
Edit: Iām sure you guys have put a lot more thought into this than me. Iād love to hear more about the things you considered and why you eliminated certain ideas.
Thatās odd, because we just deployed mobile styles about a week ago. Have you looked recently? Looks great on my Android, iOS, and Windows Phone test devices.
Also @beschizza we should probably come up with a few more structured categories for community topics. If anyone reading this is into categorization, if you could take a look at
http://bbs.boingboing.net/category/uncategorized
ā¦ you are welcome to propose say 4-6 different broad categories that encompass what you see there.
The total number of comments isnāt down as much as we thought it would be. In fact, itās in the same ballpark as it was before, though I donāt have numbers to hand.
We were planning on not having comments anymore. But then Discourse came into existence, and made for a much better idea.
In time, the focus here will slowly go from commenting on our posts to being self-sustaining. It wonāt happen overnight (until it does)
Iām concerned about splitting it before itās ripe.
That is indeed surprising given the additional hurdles, as I have mentioned before.
Have you looked recently?
No but I will give it another chance.
Through links from BoingBoing, Iāve become a Reddit regular and I think they really get it right. The simpler layout, comment flow, and density is fantastic. Has anybody tried to do a user style sheet to mimic that layout? I fear that regular reading of the BBS is going to leave me with a RSI on my scroll wheel finger. White space is good, but not everything needs to read like a book cover.
Is there any reason we are holding off on creating 5-10 categories?
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