The SharperIron Forum Revamp - Some Why and What
In just a couple of weeks (hopefully), SharperIron will go offline for a day or so to install a set of facelifts and functionality improvements. This time around, a pretty major forum overhaul is also in the plan.
What does “major” mean? To some extent, that’s up to you. We’d like to hear your ideas. It’s true that big ideas will take more than two weeks to work into the redesign. But we’d like to hear big ones as well as small ones—and we can always incorporate something bigger later.
To give those ideas some direction and boundaries, let’s consider a couple of basic questions.
Why have a forum?
SI began as a forum with a blog, then became more of a blog with a forum, then a news and article site with a forum. Quite a few news and article sites (most) follow the content-plus-comments model and offer no forum at all. Nearly all blogs fit the content-plus-comments model. So why have a forum?
1. Less centrality
A blog flows entirely from the top down. Its writers determine what will post and when, then discussion occurs based on the agenda determined by the writers. Forums, on the other hand, encourage users to start their own conversations, resulting in a wider range of content, completely unscheduled content, and less dependence on the perspective of one or two individuals.
Trade-offs are involved. The blog is easy to set up and operate, and forums are more work—especially if you want to hold discussion to some quality standards or topical boundaries. On the plus side, with the decentralization of content and conversational control forums offer comes at least the potential for more community, more sharing and contributing by more individuals and groups to what the site, as a whole, is.
2. More centrality
Less centrality yet more centrality. The language here is paradoxical but not post-modern mumbo jumbo. The observations above about less centrality sound a bit like an ad for Facebook—which prompts an important question: in today’s social-media-dominated Internet culture, why have a forum? Doesn’t Facebook and it’s few surviving rivals pretty much fit the bill for all the decentralized Web interaction anyone could want?
Not really. Facebook takes decentralization (or flattening, to move the metaphor into the vertical dimension) to an extreme. It consists of many millions of tiny centers, each an individual or group. Some of the groups have ideological or missional centers but the medium seems oriented toward each individual acting as the center of his own orbit, the hub of his own network. And when everybody is central, nobody is.
Worse yet, the decentralized and flat nature of social media lend themselves to temporary centers based entirely on “the madness of crowds,” or just herd instinct.
Forums can strike a balance between the completely top-down dynamic of the blog and the completely horizontal, atomized dynamic of social media.
At SharperIron, though opinions and perspectives differ, they just about always pivot on shared convictions. That is, here, even when disagreement is most passionate, much of that fervor derives from what we agree on, namely, that Scripture is binding on all of us, sufficient for all of us and inherently relevant to all of us.
Why a revamp?
The length of time since our last revamp is almost reason enough for changes. There hasn’t been a forum restructuring since pretty much the beginning. (I really don’t remember how the forums were labeled and organized before ‘06. But I think not much has changed.)
Secondly, Internet communities are naturally transient. Local church membership is fluid and shifty enough—and that’s in a setting where people have many shared face to face, Real Life Experiences in common. Though SI has some extraordinarily loyal constituents by Web standards, all ‘net communities are somewhat shallow and mobile. From time to time, forums have to have some new life breathed into them.
Third, the quality of the forum experience is shaped by the packaging. “The medium is the message” might put things too broadly, but who can dispute that medium is part of message? When it comes to forums, the structure of topics and groupings and such can invite or discourage participation generally and influence the kind of participation as well.
What’s coming?
The jury is honestly still out on that. Two basic directions are on the table. One, radically restructure the forum so that it bears almost no resemblance to what it was before. Call this the bold, “progressive” option. The other path is to reason that since the forums have never been reworked before, a smaller adjustment is in order. Call this the conservative option.
Conservative is likely.
At the very least, here’s what’s coming:
- New visual design
- New, user-friendly comment text editor (We’re going WYSIWYG and HTML. Bye, bye BBcode.)
- Streamlining of forums and forum-groupings into a smaller number of broader categories
- Some new forums/categories
- Miscellaneous improvements to “new posts” and “my posts,” and other forum tools
- Forum presence on the front page
Beyond that, your suggestions would be most welcome. If you’ve always thought “SI should have a forum for…” tell us about that. If you have suggestions for current forums that should be merged, separated, renamed, or jettisoned, that sort of feedback would be welcome as well.
- 9 views
[Larry]I agree with Larry on this and hope the format remains something like it’s present manifestation.this site allows users to reply to individual comments, and places the reply underneath the original comment, showing how the discussion branches off, thus making it more visually appealing and orderly.This is actually a worse design because it is virtually impossible to get caught up because you don’t know where to start. Twenty posts into a discussion someone could post a comment under the first one and you would never know it. Good forums and comment sections always place comments at the end so when someone returns, they know exactly what is new and they know that they haven’t missed something.
Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?
[JD Miller] My wife just came in and put in her 2cents. :O She hates the format that I like from the other site and loves the SI format. :cry: In case anyone is keeping track of the the style preferences I figured I would add her vote, even if it is different than mine. ;) Don’t worry, this is one of the few things we disagree on and I do not think it will strain our marriage :)check out this format…
http://www.superherohype.com/news/articles/171109-jj-abrams-star-trek-s…
- Better typography: a serif for the post text would be, IMO, more suited to the feel of this site; larger type; more consistent hierarchy; improved line length.
- I know some people really like having their signatures under their posts, but it’s mostly noise. That information should be left for the user profile.
- This might be contentious (as if the previous item wasn’t), but I think the post titles should be removed. A few people always use them (hello again, Aaron), but it seems most don’t, which only results in reading the same words twice — once in the title and once in the post. Quite a few posts start with [X] wrote: Quote: [text]
- The header needs reorganizing; couldn’t the horizontal ad be up there, freeing up the top of the post?
- I find the current emoticons distracting. Do they really need to be turned into graphics? I personally don’t think so. They also mess with the line-height (increasing it).
I also prefer the flat thread. I think the weaving in and out of mini-conversations within a conversation are distracting and confusing. There is also the fact that people (like me) will read the OP and the thread, and reply in general to several posts without wanting to reply specifically to each separate post. I replied to a blot post the other day that had threaded comments, and really did not like it at all.
But I’ll grant that this is a preference, not a conviction.
http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys.php] http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys/smiley-alien003.gif
So far, the site as a whole uses a sans serif font (right now the new style is mostly Trebuchet & Mac world equivalent), and it would look a little odd if duscussions were serif fonted. But best font size has always been hard to judge. I actually had to part with a nearly brand new laptop computer a year or so ago because the 1080p resolution resulted in overly tiny text (and Windows’ options in this regard were not suitable… you can enlarge stuff but often with awkward consequences and if you bump the overall resolution down below the screen’s native resolution, things get fuzzy).
Just pointing out that font size depends on your screen and not just on the site design. That said, there is some room for larger if this seems like it would be helpful overall.
About comment titles, we’re kind of stuck with them. The reason is that the Foundry, New Posts listings, etc. rely on them to list posts. It is possible to make these lists just grab the first x characters in the post body instead of using the title field, but you have to use something to identify comment posts. And what the current title system does is grab the first x characters if you don’t key in a title. So… with titles, we’re really giving posters the option of controlling what displays in comment lists.
About flat vs. threaded discussions: One thing developers seem to mostly agree on is that flat is more friendly to new users and non-Geeks. Us geeky types like to have lots of bells and whistles and be able to collapse and expand sub-sub-threads and that sort of thing. It’s cool. But the trade off is lots of gadget clutter, which many find intimidating. This is why Facebook, for example, has extremely simple post controls—probably too simple, though they do seem to be slowly adding stuff to it.
Smileys… the Smileys bar might go away in the future. It doesn’t seem to get a whole lot of use, so—just clutter? I suppose most people know how to use the handful of smileys they like to use, just with keystrokes. :) :D ;)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Most of the discussion is about preference. However, as a semi-novice at all this forum stuff, I have benefited greatly by the flat thread style and ease of use on SI. Aaron is right when he says the threaded threads and bells and whistles cause too much confusion for people like me - the hassle just isn’t worth the gain. I would have been one of those who went and found other ways to spend my time.
Why is it that my voice always seems to be loudest when I am saying the dumbest things?
By “bar,” I mean what’s pictured below.
Anybody have thoughts on forums/subforums/groupings and that sort of thing?
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
@JD, I was arguing against turning text emoticons (like the one above) into graphics rather than removing them altogether.
@Aaron, re typography:
- I was advocating a serif font for the post text, not necessarily for the entire site. But that’s just a preference.
- You are correct that resolutions influence how large / small we perceive the text to be. That’s why I think it’s a good thing to bump up the font size a bit. However, see next point:
- The current font stack actually starts with Tahoma, which won’t be very pretty in larger sizes. (Also, Tahoma doesn’t have true italics. This latter point is small, I know.)
[Dan B.]Do you happen know off hand if Trebuchet has true italics? I have noticed that Tahoma looks weird italicized. The slant seems excessive. Of course, I’m sure there’s a way to specify an italic font for the “em” tag, and maybe the “i” tag… but more fuss and bother.
The current font stack actually starts with Tahoma, which won’t be very pretty in larger sizes. (Also, Tahoma doesn’t have true italics. This latter point is small, I know.)
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
That’s probably more font geekiness than many SI readers can stand, so I’ll stop for now :^)
I looked at a couple of the new MS fonts- Candara and Corbel. These didn’t really strike me as being nicer looking than Treb/Tahoma/Verdana, though they’re supposed to be optically better for tired eyeballs. But there are still a fair number of PCs that don’t have these fonts I guess… and I don’t know if there are near enough Mac equivalents that are commonly on Macs.
(Nowadays you have to think about what’s on phones and ipads and such too)
There’s always Times New Roman but… it’s just so boring.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
JLS
JL
Discussion