BuddyPress.org

“Rather than thinking of the activity stream as just a place where everything is aggregated, the activity stream will be the place where everything actually happens/is stored.”

Praise the lord! (sorry for the evangelic speak but I think this is a major positive change)

“small iterative improvements”: Regarding the forums

I’ve been debating to stop viewing the forums the way we’ve been. Established BP-websites using it will be less interested in this. I’m still starting out and would like to change my website to 1.2-style and ahead.

Currently (1.1) the forums are available when walking to groups and then the forums. You have to click a lot to get to the posts.

The new theme (1.2) is trying to place the activity stream as the place to _do_ it all. I’ve been using testBP.org like crazy because it’s like a mini Facebook/FriendFeed. So I like it.

So what happens to the forums? Why will anyone even bother to go all the way down to groups/forums and post something in the forum (or even at the website.com/forum/-page) with 1.2? Buddypress, out of the box, isn’t using some kind of TinyMCE or else that would allow you to enter things in a different way (most forums have some kind of quoting system). It’s just a box to write in. But still it’s a categorised box and replies to the box is shown more egalitarian with the same size (comments to posts in the stream aren’t).

My guess is that communities with very active forums will still be used. But newcome BP-installations will not use them that much unless they’re really big communities (+5000).

This does change the way that we interact and talk. Nothing in the activity stream (1.2) will be important enough to be put at the top of the list. It’s just the stream with the latest new activity at the top. This is another change away from the old forum style. In a regular forum, the latest post with a new comment will trigger the topic to move to the top of the forum topic list (the old activity stream).This is where BP will be very different. There’s no retriggering of topics to the top if you aren’t using the forums the old way (which people will probably do less and less).

Facebook is nice but you loose the use of forums since they aren’t presented in the stream. The stream rules… This way BP will be focused on social relationships that mainly are filled with activity updates consisting of bits and fragments instead of intense debate of old topics. Why? Because there’s no retriggering of topics to the top.

Am I alone to prophecy the death of the forum? …and the need of some kind of solution to this merge of everything into the status update, which I also aplaud…