Forum Replies Created
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My vote goes towards adding a usability/interface design expert to the team. … I think buddypress should be designed for the average user and not for the average programmer.
This. Most definitely this.
jivany is saying precisely what I was getting at. A ‘forum’ is not a specific tool or product: it is a way of structuring online conversation. I continue to argue that it is an essential one.
If I could rip bbPress out of BP and slot in Vanilla (for example) as the forum-interaction-service-provider and have it integrate nicely with the rest of the app, I’d do so in a freaking instant.
The stuff like posting pictures of your newest pet or latest vacation – that “personal interest” and “personal interaction” stuff that makes people warm and fuzzy and feel like they belong to a group/community.
Precisely. Anyone who’s been running web communities for any length of time knows how absolutely important this kind of thing is to people. A community without it, unless it’s grounded offline in some real-world way, will die. And it happens in forum-style discussion threads.
Yep, jivany, you’re right. But I think it’s important (as you imply) that we keep in mind that thinking as developers (‘Well, it’s all just posts! Text data in the db, after all!’) can be a dangerous trap — we also need to think as interaction designers, in terms of what users are doing and want to do. The function before the form, again.
OK, monster essay ahoy. This is a big part of why I think ‘forums’ are an important component of the overall experience, no matter what we call them.
Here’s the meat from a couple of comments I made before on this subject, here on this very forum:
I think web community, more perhaps for people who are not so much of the disposable, in-the-moment, ritalin-riddled, post-it-and-forget it generation, needs to have feet solidly planted in not only the ongoing ephemeral stream of conversation, but also in a more long-term, permanent ’space’ of shared history, shared interactions that are performed in public and can be gone back to, interactions that more than any set of xprofile fields or avatars build a mutual understanding between users based on personality and past discussion. Build, in other words, community.
and here’s another:
Different users use sites in different ways, of course, and the Activity stream is certainly one user story that shouldn’t be ignored. But, as I’ve said so many times before over the past almost-a-year, forums, in one sense or another, have a sense of permanency for users, a ‘virtual place’ they can return to, and I believe should be the anchor of a site like this and many others, where the ongoing stream of activity and making-friends for superfans and power users is less important than information being discoverable and discussion interactions being aggregated rather than just fading away. I am growing more disenchanted with the apparent lack of attention being paid to what I believe for many is essential for a successful community site — a featureful forum setup that is the steady beating heart of the swirl of activity.
Yes, I know the bbPress option is suboptimal as a solution, but it’s what we have to work with, and it can’t be ignored or passed off to bbpress.org, because we’re not running bbPress, we’re running an interface free, bbPress-plugin-incompatible fork of it, in essence if not reality, and I really do believe that more attention needs to be paid to the limitations of it as a component of BP and ways to make it work for community-building and user satisfaction.
Anyway, back to Activity. On true social network sites (whatever that means, exactly), it makes some sense that things are ephemeral, that interactions disappear beneath the fold, because, hey, it’s all about interacting with people, socially.
But the focus of this site (and most sites I might consider building with BP) is not just making friends and having a grand old social time. It’s sharing information, asking questions, discussing solutions, offering and asking for assistance, and it’s important that the interface those interactions be structured discoverable for people who are going to have the same questions in future as BP adoption grows, and the toolset for creating them be rich, both from the administration and user-facing perspectives.
How many times do we see the same questions being asked, basic or otherwise? To answer my own question, a lot. That’s just human nature in part, certainly, but it’s also, I think, because the tools we have for using these forums are vestigial, and people just don’t have the information they need at their fingertips. User confusion and frustration will kill a community faster than goatse images. We’re all so used to using this app that I think we lose sight of just how daunting it is for new users. The site I’m building for an existing community on a different platform has taught me that, very quickly.
—Some sites, some userbases NEED structure for conversation. This site we’re on right now is an example, as I outlined above.
Now the irony here is I was able to go back and find those comments (having to use Google because the BP site search didn’t work, I note) because they were made as parts of conversations in a permanent, permalinked — forum-style — framework.
Consider a possible taxonomy of user activity and interactions on websites (a huge project, of course — I’m just trying for a sketch here).
At the bottom the very bottom would be simple records of activity.
Next higher would be Facebook-y pokes and friend-button mashings and things like that — non-verbal pings, basically, but deliberate.
Next up would be status broadcasts — Tweets, or personal activity updates here. Verbal, but basically free-floating.
Next would be comments on other people’s activity or posts or pictures or whatever. Comments ‘on’ something, in other words — focused activity, verbal, but let’s call it transitive, in the sense that there is an ‘object’ being commented on.
Next would be discussions, like the one we’re having here. Threaded or unthreaded, paginated or not, they are multi-person, ongoing interactions about a subject or subjects. This is the kind of interaction we think of as occurring in forums structures, mostly, although that term is used to describe a wide range of structure.
Now I want you to notice that there’s a leap in cognition, in interaction, in format, and in permanency in that last step. It’s a step up to actual discussion rather than commenting ‘on’ things, it’s a step up to engaging with multiple people, it’s a step up to threads (and possibly threaded conversation, but that’s a implementation detail) and pages, and most importantly, it’s a permanent interaction for the first time as we climb the ladder of the hierarchy.
A ‘forum’ discussion is something people will return to, to add to, or just to re-read, to get information from, to learn more about the people involved or the subject being discussed. It is part of the fabric of community because it is permanent. It is the bedrock of virtual permanency, to coin a phrase.
‘Social’ networking, people seem to forget, is about people. And it’s through the history of interactions in structured discussions that we learn about other people in a web community and decide if we want to be ‘social’ with them or not. This structured, searchable, historical record of activity and interaction is utterly essential for building real community. That’s forums.
Just to finish off the taxonomy, I’d say the top of the ladder would be blog posts, at least if they are ‘written’ things intended to be read by others and then possibly responded to. Notice that they are, in a way, the flipside, functionally, of the reply-to activity, being the mover rather than the response.
Now this is getting ridiculously long, but I don’t believe in ignoring honest questions even from people who insult me, so let me just wrap it up (and there’s more to say, but I have things to do) with this:
Where else other than a forum would I be able to write a longform comment about a complicated subject, as part of an ongoing discussion? We don’t have to call it a forum if we don’t want, but this STRUCTURE, this type of format, is the only one available to us, even at a conceptual level. It’s not something we can omit across the board. I suggested earlier, and I stand by my suggestion, that it’s ridiculous to suggest such a thing.
The forum style of community member interaction is an integral part of the hierarchy of ways that users will interact online, a way that they expect to be able to interact, and a way that is entirely reasonable for them to expect. It is not only useful for some functions (such as user-to-user support here at buddypress.org, or sharing information (ie code and tips and stuff in the case of bp.org)) that many if not all sites will be providing, it is the organic way that ongoing web community builds a foundation, that users come to know one another, and as such is the essential key for true ‘social networking’ among people who do not already know one another.
I reckon.
OK, this was edited in to a previous comment (or I didn’t notice it), so I’ll have a go.
@stwc, can you answer the question, what makes forums so great for collaboration? What can you do with forums that you can’t do with blog posts + comments?
I don’t know why we started talking about collaboration, or at least you did. Collaboration is certainly something that people do, in some situations, but as a function of a community, it’s just one of many, and pretty low on the list, so I’m not going to bother addressing that particularly. It doesn’t seem at all germane to the discussion.
I will try to address the what I think you’re really asking, though, about why forums (or, more precisely, forum-like structured interactions) are important. Going to take some time to write it though, so I’ll edit this presently.
Sure. Now tell us why.
Well, no. I said that your comment about parasitism was ridiculous.
When we discuss things, and have differing viewpoints about an issue, as adults, we are free to attack the arguments people make. That is an entirely different thing from attacking the person. If I say that your argument is ridiculous, and you turn around and say that I’m an idiot, that’s not fair play, you see.
Edit: Anyway, I see the irony of arguing with this fellow who hates forums so much about how to use forums in a forum, and I think it’s a derail that I’d best stop contributing to, because the ongoing discussion is an extremely important one for the future of BP, I think (despite that fact that there’s no evidence that Andy is following along), so I’ll bow out.
If you can’t tell the conceptual difference between a forum and social network, this discussion is probably wasted on you.
Every time I interact with you, you immediately start insulting me. If you can’t make your points clearly without belittling your interlocutor right out of the gate, it’s hard to take those points seriously. Perhaps it’s best that I go back to ignoring you, then.
Buddypress could be a next generation social network because it would be more content-centric, thanks to its WordPress roots. Forums only distract from what could be a very logical conceptual approach.
This doesn’t even make sense to me. ‘Groups’ are a ‘killer app’? ‘Next generation social network’ because it’s ‘content-centric’? What on earth?
Yes, those are scare quotes.
Honestly, though. I don’t know what kind of point you’re trying to make, other than that you HATE FORUMS GRAR.bbPress is a parasite that is killing Buddypress from within. Buddypress should have been a next-generation social network, instead it is becoming a messy backward forum/social network hybrid.
That’s the single most ridiculous thing I’ve read on this forum yet.
Yes, it’s a forum. It’s a pretty crappy feature-light forum, one with buzzword-compliant toys and gewgaws arrayed around it, for sure, but it’s a forum, and putting your fingers in your ears and going lalalalala trying to deny that it’s the single most important part of this Buddypress install right here doesn’t change the fact that it is. And that centrality of the forum experience will be the case for other sites as well. Not all of them, certainly, but enough that it is an extremely important piece of the puzzle.
People get so attached to their meaningless buzzwords they forget that the whole idea is to serve the needs of actual users. They forget that people don’t like to waste too much of their time on ephemeral interaction, don’t bother with effort when there’s no permanency. If users don’t like the way your site works or are confused or are missing functionality, you’re doing it wrong.
I don’t know. I’ve spent months working with BP, but I’m beginning to be very disenchanted and to have serious doubts about the future of it, because (in part inspired by the user-hostile new design of buddpress.org — if you drive away your developer community, this kind of project will inevitably fail) I have begun to suspect that the over-riding goal isn’t to serve end-users’ needs as much as it seems to be ticking checboxes. Don’t I feel stupid for wasting all that time? Yep. I’m not sure if I should just chuck all the work I’ve done turning BP into a user-friendly tool for my userbase and start over with a different platform or what. Certainly the enthusiasm’s bleeding out of me at a rapid rate, though.
@andrea_r I in particular, am having to deal with a LOT of new users to BuddyPress who were told it was a forum
And that’s a problem with BP how, exactly? The only problem with the forums functionality of BP is that it’s too damned weak, not that it exists in the first place. I am very very strongly of the precisely opposite opinion to yours (although I suspect Andy, for one, is more in your camp on these matters, which is inclining me to abandon BP entirely) — fully-featured forum-like functionality is an indispensable key to a many successful sites, based on the userbase and functionality required, and the expectations and needs of the site owner’s intended audience. That mode of user interaction is one that users want, for goodness sakes, and trying to deny it to them because we think we know better is a fool’s game.
A Buddypress without robust forum capabilities is a poor man’s Facebook, and nobody in their right mind (except Facebook-haters like me) is going to abandon sites like that without a good reason. A good reason like a solid core of historical interactions preserved in a forum-like structure, filling the gap between the ‘formality’ of blog posts and the ephemerality of soon-disappearing activity stream interactions.
Abandoning a tried, tested, and true form of internet community interaction because of some quixotic quest to be modern and social-networky is going to kill this platform dead faster than anything else might.
In reply to: Spam registrationsUse the search before posting. There are literally dozens of threads about this common problem.
In reply to: Unpublishing Member Profile and SearchNot sure what you mean by ‘unpublish’ exactly in the BP context. I would guess that the best thing to do would be to use the WP(MU) dashboard to change their user role to ‘Inactive’ or ‘Blocked’.
Fake edit: Testing that, because your question made me curious, though, shows unexpected behaviour. I changed a user to ‘Inactive’ on my testbed, logged in as that user just fine afterwards. And, as I expected, their profile and content is still visible in Buddypress itself, as is their blog.
I wonder if you could wrap the single member profile page in a div that is hidden if their status is ‘Inactive’ or something like that. Seems kludgy, though.
Real edit, later: Or maybe not, in terms of logging in. Some very weird behaviour happening…
In reply to: List of Best PluginsYeah, I’d say that because Buddypress is a bit kitchen-sinky, in my experience it’s a good idea to think about what kind of community you’re going to try and build (or move to BP), then think about what kind of functionality they might want, then how to build it, then look at plugins or code snippets or whatever that will allow you to do that. That’s generally best-practice, anyway.
A default Buddypress install can be confusing and daunting for new users.
In reply to: Change Behavior of GroupsYou’ll need to create a child theme. Copy over the files you want to change from bp-themes/bp-default/groups/single, preserving directorioes, and edit home.php and whatever else you like appropriately.
I would use the language file to rename your Forum tab to Home, but that’s not really necessary if you’re not going to make global changes. Just do it in the home.php (etc).
In reply to: Existing bbpress to buddypressI’d just go into the MySQL database for the old one with PHPMyAdmin or whatever tool you use for a MySQL GUI and export table by table, then import to the corresponding bbPress tables in Buddypress. You’ll need to hand-edit some stuff in the meta tables and generally mess around, but I’ve done it a few times on my testbed and it’s worked just fine.
Set up a testbed BP install first and populate it with some test data to see how things fit together — it’s not all that complicated. Then try the export-import process on some test installs, figure out what needs to be done. Basically, now that I thought to look at it, what Boone talks about in the post r-a-y linked.
In reply to: Extra Page’s in BuddyPress: “is they’re any way you can edit it through a text editor rather than dashboard. Or is there any known way of how to solve this problem”
I tire of trying to parse through the mangled English we see here sometimes to tease out intended meaning. Also, I believe the question was edited since first posted.
The answer to that questions is: of course, any good FTP client will let you do that kind of thing. My preferred tools: get the WinSCP FTP client, get Notepad++ and set it as the text editor for WinSCP, double click on any PHP (or whatever) file on your site through the FTP client, it’ll open locally in Notepad++, when you hit save it’ll automatically upload the file. Boom, done.
In reply to: Forum CategoriesI’d say that the last thing BP needs is yet another layer of abstraction on top of actual user interaction. Just use tags! The forums view ajax autofilters to tag view when you click on one, and you could quite easily create a dropdown list to limit the tags available to the users rather than just making it a textbox. Presto! Instant ‘categories’!
[Sorry no help to offer, but I’m just commenting in this thread so I can find it later a little more easily, since we don’t have forum thread favoriting any more]
In reply to: buddypress.org: Location in the profilesI’ve never been able to get jjj’s plugin to work.
In reply to: group types@firetag — as I talked about here, I’m really keen to have something to start from to get this going. Would much appreciate anything you can share to help!
In reply to: Buddypress.org’s New Plugin Review FunctionalityFor front-end guys like me, it’s easier to see basic working examples than try to look over the code of complex plugins to pick out the relevant code.
@agrundner Definitely. Like many hobbyist coders, I can take sample code or something and modify it to my needs most of the time, but without the cloud being seeded, so to speak, it’s hard going.
The other thing I’d add to your list is how to split Groups into different kinds, with different functionality hooked to them. On this site, now, User Created Groups can be arbitratrily created, Plugin Groups can be created around an individual plugin, and Support Groups are only creatable by an admin.
That’s precisely the kind of setup I’d be interested in getting running on the site I’m currently working (where ‘plugin’ is another arbitrary class of ‘object’), along with the reviewing functionality for those ‘objects’ and standard forums/activity/album+ images/links etc attached.
Post it here, please, as a courtesy to the community.
Let’s not stop there! From my laundry list off the top of my head (not bothering to use a UL because I don’t know if it’ll get stripped or not):
Link in the overall forums directory view to the last post in a thread (as Modemlooper suggests above)
Thread pagination links for each forum thread in the directory view
Username of the thread starter on the directory view
Pagination to get to older threads in the forums directory
Blockquote, pre or code tags, some indication of what HTML is allowed in forum posts
Different styling of a and a:visited elements in the forum directory view
A return of the ability to favorite threads to bookmark them for later and a place to easily survey and keep up with the threads we’ve started or commented infor starters.
In reply to: Extra Page’s in BuddyPressCan we at least get blockquotes working in the forums? This is ridiculous. Changing it to italics above.
kses.php, as I recall.
