BuddyPress.org

@Peterverkooijen said: Why would you need forums? What makes forums so great for collaboration?

You’re confusing me now. You don’t see the benefit of forums yet you have basically created a forum on your site.

Everyone has to think outside of the box because “forums” != bbPress. I’ve spent many many years on many different “forums”, all the way back to USENET and “newsgroups” and BBS’s. Forums are a useful tool on any website unless you are trying to create the next twitter clone where no one really cares what anyone said 5 minutes ago.

I do agree that it might be nice for BP to drop bbPress and embrace the multiple post-type functionality that WP 3.0 offers. Stuff like Akismet could then be used for comments/replies to “forum-thread” post-types. No duplication of functionality, etc.

Maybe an alternative would be for “someone” to write a forum plugin leveraging the new WP3.0 post-type functionality that also plugs into BP activity streams, etc.

My vote goes towards adding a usability/interface design expert to the team. The work the programmers are doing on Buddypress is amazing and I am really impressed by the progress that’s being made, but a lot of functionality feels a bit clunky and unnecessarily complex to use. The design might feel logical and usable to more advanced users who work with computers a lot, but for those with less experience I can imagine it’s a different matter.

I think buddypress should be designed for the average user and not for the average programmer.

@jivany (“I don’t understand your BP forum complaints. You don’t use forums because you have basically replicated the forum concept in blog posts/comments”)

Exactly! My point is that integrating an external forum like bbPress into Buddypress is unnecessary and only creates a lot of confusion, undermines the structure. Less is more. KISS.

I would like Buddypress to consolidate on the smallest number of parts, leverage what’s already in WordPress, instead of adding database tables and external scripts that partly overlap/clash with other parts.

But bbPress seems to be taking over Buddypress. Wrong direction imho.

@Peterverkooijen based on your setup description, I don’t understand your BP forum complaints. You don’t use forums because you have basically replicated the forum concept in blog posts/comments. The only advantage I see of this setup (without looking in great detail) is the benefit of using the more robust WP commenting system.

Fundamentally you have created a forum.

@stwc Agreed – I’m a developer – I can (mostly) make BP do what I want it to. I’m not a community builder because there is really no such thing. As a site owner, I can only offer up tools that I think my site needs to help it become a community. Once a community forms, the community will be what drives new site features as they will use the tools provided in the manner they see fit.

As @LPH2005 (basically) mentioned, you can’t force people to use a site they have no interest in. Yes, some might discard that particular example because it’s “kids” but think about it – kids are the ones that are going to be most able to pickup a new concept. If they can’t figure BP out and it doesn’t interest them then there’s a huge problem with BP.

@jivany (“On a typical WP installation, blog posts are written by site owners and/or their chosen authors. This means only certain selected groups of people can start a new discussion point/thread. Forums typically allow everyone to start a new discussion and have their peers comment on that topic.”)

I use Marius Ooms groupblog plugin in a custom theme with P2 front-end posting. Group members are automatically added as blog authors, so they can all post on the group blog and comment on what other group members have posted, in threaded comments with hide/show toggle. They can post short Twitter-like ‘status updates’ or full blog posts.

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.

@Peterverkooijen said:

@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’ll wade in here (ugh, bad idea?) with one major difference between forums and blog posts. On a typical WP installation, blog posts are written by site owners and/or their chosen authors. This means only certain selected groups of people can start a new discussion point/thread.

Forums typically allow everyone to start a new discussion and have their peers comment on that topic. Site owners that offer up forums are opening the door to a *community* where people feel they have some ownership of the site/content, etc.

Looking at activity streams – they are wonderful but really, they are best suited for sites where people really want to know what their peers are up to over and above the “normal” discussion threads that can happen in blog comments or forum threads. 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.

@Peterverkooijen, you are totally correct in your statement that blogs and forums should be the same. Even more correct when you look forward to WP 3.0 with it’s flexible post-type definitions.

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.

i would have to painfully agree that there are some serious usability issues that have popped up in the latest versions of BP. I think @finni3 hit the nail on the head that the changes since 1.1.X do not seem to have made sense in terms of ease of use or accessibility. What i am afraid is happening is that the entire project is/had become too much a programmer’s project and things like optimization have taken precedent over usability. This has been my number one fear all along that UI concepts (like the Wire)would get tossed aside to accommodate back-end efficiency. I (for one) am for slowing down the release cycle at this point and let’s get some more user centric testing in place BEFORE major version releases.

@stwc, the collaboration point came from Sadr. Why would it be low on the list?

Defining ‘Community’, ‘Forum’, ‘Social network’ was discussed a bit earlier in the thread. My attempt is included here. We probably need to delineate better what we’re talking about.

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.

@stwc, OK, your argument was irrelevant nonsense. Better?

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.

@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?

“Every time I interact with you, you immediately start insulting me. I don’t know why I bother.”

Only because you insulted me first. (“That’s the single most ridiculous thing I’ve read on this forum yet.” etc.)

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.

@Sadr (“I see immense potential in BuddyPress as an open collaboration platform. I do believe though that traditional social networks do not encourage collaboration, maybe continuity in particular, well enough, and so there’s a lot to learn or borrow from other systems more commonly used in that context.”)

I agree Buddypress has great potential as a collaboration platform, but the natural focus point for that collaboration would be groups where members would come together and share content using blog posts+comments, WP’s native way of organizing content.

Why would you need forums? What makes forums so great for collaboration?

Groups could be Buddypress killer app. 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.

@stwc (“People get so attached to their meaningless buzzwords they forget that the whole idea is to serve the needs of actual users … Abandoning a tried, tested, and true form of internet community interaction because of some quixotic quest to be modern and social-networky …”)

If you can’t tell the conceptual difference between a forum and a social network, this discussion is wasted on you.

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.

xspringe,
There is someone doing a Google Summer of Code project which is working on a plugin for BP that will report objectionable content. I expect spam will be part of the objectionable content that can/will be reported with that plugin. You can support his efforts: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/bp-moderation/