I just want to re-iterate these points. Or perhaps, the Discourse transition is only dealing with the technical part of the problem, and you have a completely different plan for the human part?
From reading this and similar threads, I have a clear view of the technical problems, and how you hope that Discourse will solve them. And I see that you want to revitalize the community.
But I don’t see 1. what you believe to be the reason for the communities decline, and 2. how you plan to counter that. And that’s the question I’d really like to see answered.
Again I want to say thanks to you all for taking the time to actually put your feedback down in words. It really is appreciated. While this is clearly not a debate, in that this decision is ours to make, it certainly gives me the opportunity to try and dispel your concerns or explain our rationale, and that is really important. I have addressed some of those concerns inline below in red.
Wonderful! That, to me, is the most important thing. Everything else will take getting used to but knowing that all content will continue to be available in some form is a big relief.
Jeff Atwood is technically brilliant, but – alas – not at the very top of the list of people I’d go to for help developing a stronger sense of community. But wanting a more flexible platform that you have more control over, I understand completely.
One more question for you. Several people have mentioned that a prior pruning of sub-forums caused some highly knowledgeable people to leave, because it had gotten harder to keep track of discussions they were actively interested in among the flood of beginner questions. I wasn’t here back then, so I have no opinion on this, but I’m curious to know what your take is.
@Hawk - Just FYI, I used to be a partner for vBulletin. I am no longer affiliated with them.
And indeed, that one sentence of yours I missed, but still, it seems one of the goals for the change is to make the community better as cpradio clearly stated.
Please take heart in knowing we didn’t make this decision over-night but ultimately realized, we couldn’t take the community to where it could thrive without getting off vBulletin.
This is what spurred me on to write here actually. There are still a good number of thriving vBulletin forums.
With regard to user experience, the simple fact that we have full flexibility to customise Discourse quickly and easily means that the UX is in our hands, not the hands of vB.
Is there any documentation on this you could quickly point me to on how Discourse gives you more flexibility on UX than vB does? I’d like to understand how this is possible.
I also noticed you use Disqus for your article discussions. Will that change with Discourse? I can imagine having two different discussion engines causes not only issues with users, but there is also no way to commonly search through the posts, which lowers the ability to find content. It is also impossible to find new activity that way.
I guess, in the end, as long as you are all clear on the fact that Discourse won’t necessarily help this community be a better community and it definitely won’t mean it will thrive automatically, then I am happy.
To be honest I am not a fan of the Discourse method of hierarchy structure. I get that you can sort by tags/categories but if you don’t then you are greeted with a huge list of topics. It just looks too “messy” for me especially with a lot of avatar pictures (which pushes the load time up quite alot).
I was interested to hear that too. The statistics don’t show a drop in traffic after the cull, as was suggested in one of the comments and I didn’t personally notice people leave, but I have to take the comments at face value. I made the cull with two goals in mind. Firstly, we got rid of the noisy forums that generated little to no healthy engagement (SEO for instance – it was a mire of spam and fluff posts). We archived the old threads of course, we didn’t delete them. Secondly, we merged some of the smaller sub-forums that got very little traffic into the larger forums that housed them. I am hearing people say that that was a mistake, and in response we are revisiting that decision with the move to Discourse. We will likely reopen or in some cases create forums with a view to attracting a higher level of healthy discussion.
Ah, I see. Apologies for the mistake.
Part and parcel of the move is to refocus the community in the hope of reenergising it, but that is more to do with the structural and procedural changes that will take place as part of the migration, than the actual platform itself. We have spent a lot of time discussing the direction that we want to take this community, and some of that means that we have a requirement for tools or functionality that aren’t part of vBulletin. We thought about whether continuing to heavily customise a platform that we no longer like was a better option than starting new with something that from my perspective is exciting and has a lot of potential, and decided to go with the latter. (When I say ‘we’ I am referring to the GM of SitePoint and me. My staff are loyal and supportive, and although some of them have mixed feelings about the change, they have all decided to stay on board, for which I am very grateful. Many of them are putting in lots of extra time helping me with the logistics of the migration, but their opinions are their own and if you want direct answers on why decisions are being made, I am the only one that can give them to you.)
I agree! In fact, I am in the process of building a brand new community on vB Cloud. vB serves many people well – I just don’t believe it is the right product for SitePoint at this point in time.
I think you may have misunderstood my point. I’m not suggesting that one platform has more potential than the other when it comes to UX, I’m simply saying that as a Rails house, we have the resources in-house to customise a Discourse experience to suit our needs and those of the community. We don’t have that option with vB any longer without outsourcing (and tbh I’ve been having a fair bit of trouble finding reliable people to write good vB plugins of late, but that issue is now moot).
These days I am responsible only for the forums, so can’t give definitive answers with regard to other parts of the company, but a big part of going with Discourse over other forum platforms is WordPress integration. One of our first priorities after the community has bedded in is to work on integration of the forums with sitepoint.com and Learnable.
Very clear. I hope you’ll stick around and be a part of the community to find out first hand. I value your insight.
Indeed. We’re addressing this two-fold. We are revisiting our current forum structure as I mentioned above. I also hope that a change will facilitate a re-focus and allow us to hone in on the areas that we can take further.
Speaking of migrations what happens to posts with links in them? I am referring to links that are internal links and point to other sitepoint posts as we often paste links in quoting another sitepoint post. Do they migrate over as well and point to the posts as they are in the new forum or will they point to old posts in the archives? I imagine if they are left dangling it will not only be confusing but possibly also bad for SEO. (That is Google may mark you down for having dead links.)
Ok, I got you. Thanks for your time too. And thank you for the compliment.
As for sticking around, I took a good look at the forums and I think they are, well, too general or missing the specific topics for my own current interests. For instance, my interests are in PHP, but more specifically in the Symfony2 framework. I am also very interested in HHVM and anything it would take to make PHP as performant as possible (like Nginx + PHP-FPM + APC). I am also studying MongoDB and am very interested in Bootstrap and jQuery for the UI side of web development. These are all topics which seem to be missing or skimmed on as part of a general topic in the forums. jQuery, for example, is mixed in with Javascript. Putting the two together waters down the subject of jQuery terribly. You could have alleviated that a bit with prefixes, but haven’t.
As a suggestion, maybe create topics (sub-forums) based on current trends and articles that have been written. For instance, you could have sub-forums under PHP for HHVM and PHP-FPM or just have a “High Performance PHP” sub-forum and under the great articles like this one or this one, you could write “Discuss High Performance PHP our forum!”. In other words, if there isn’t a forum about the subject of an article, make one and link to it.
Something I also don’t understand is why Perl and Python are in the same forum. Python has nothing to do with Perl per se and Python is gaining greatly in popularity. It should be in its own forum really. And why is Java missing completely? Java is a whole world in itself, I know, but it is a serious part of web development too.
I would say the generalization, or cull as you call it, of the forums is a problem, especially for the “specialists”, who are more than likely the experts you need here too. The generalization simply kills any want to be active for them and from what I see of Discourse, it is even harder to specialize it (they actually had to add sub-categories as a feature??? :goof:). You might want to think about that too for the future.
Yep, I agree and there is a thread going on to that effect here:
In that seem thread there was some talk about how deep Discourse can go in sub forums and it didn’t sound very deep. Whether that can be rectified by a plugin or not I am not sure.
There was talk about how this community could grow and while Discourse has been touted as the next step up from vBulleting it has also been acknowledged that Discourse isn’t going to solve every human problem and bring about world peace the day after its installed
However, when we do decide to look at the human factors I do hope that Sitepoint does consult with the community and make our road to success a community project and not simply a managerial “strategic” initiative.
If you want to regain quality content and quality posters, it doesn’t always equal changing community software. With each forum software it is possible to hide or delete posts that don’t make any sense or are low quality. With each software it is possible to create rules or guidelines about which content is accepted. With each forum software that exists it is possible to re-order categories/forum or to create new ones. You can revive the community without the need for new software.
Listen, I do understand the technical reasons you have for changing software. But I am a bit afraid you are counting to much on the software to solve the community issue. While in most cases member behavior and quality of content won’t change (or get even worse).
Hey there. Thanks for taking the time to put down your feedback. I appreciate it.
I feel a bit like I’m flogging a dead horse though. I’m not expecting the platform migration to change fundamental social issues, but I do hope it might help us to refocus and regenerate somewhat. If it doesn’t, we’re no worse off.
I think I’ve worked out why I dislike these forums, I like to browse between sub categories on the forum, HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. From the get go this is difficult because when you click on Forums in the main navigation, it takes you to http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/ which shows the most popular posts for the week / month etc. I find navigating the topics down the left side a real pain, I don’t know why, I think it’s because it’s not smack bang in front of me. Instead it should take you to http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/forum.php which is in the sub navigation or forum navigation. This page seems a lot easier to navigate and more clear. I guess I just don’t like that there is two separate ways to navigate the forums. Anyway, can’t wait for the new forums as I think I’ll spend more time around here.
xenForo at least is a quantum leap forward from vB, please do not make sweeping statements that have no basis in fact. For those interested xenForo was written from the ground up using latest internet technologies by the guys who originally made vB a decent product … way back before the last version 3 shambles.
Joining a number of others here who will no longer use the site if it moves platform to Discourse, talk about taking a major step backwards.
