Sitepoint moves to Discourse?

Well, this should be an interesting case stuff for how well the new 'revolutionary' forum script holds up. After all, Sitepoint is a multi million post big board rather than some tech geek's playground. Here's their announcement about it:

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?1197651-The-SitePoint-Forums-are-Moving-House

But while they talk about the script changes as some sort of hope for the site's revivial, I'd like to give my personal reasons for why I don't use the site. Because trust me, it's the kind of site I'd like to use given how I've been a regular reader for a good few years now. But one thing stops me.

The spam and fluff posts.

Basically, the soul of the site doesn't feel like it's there any more. Why? Because the SEO marketers/idiots/people in third world sweatshops took over and posted nothing but one liners that don't make me want to discuss the topic at hand. The quality of discussion is just abysmal at the moment, and hence I don't see becoming a member as worth it.

That's what is really killing Sitepoint in activity. And do you know what? I don't think moving to Discourse will fix this, because it's a community and member problem. You don't need Stack Overflow's software to save your site and boost activity and member participation. You need their community and people. And this is even more the case when you consider one additional thing:

Stack Overflow's members would probably have become Sitepoint members had the site not become deluged by Digitalpoint style low quality posts and fluff.

But what do you think about their move to Discourse? A good idea? Or perhaps just a band aid fix for a deeper community issue that the owners should really be focusing on instead?

 

I personally feel any move from vBulletin is a good move. Will it revive their community? I don't know. I run a site just like theirs and due to various reasons, lost a lot of activity. One of those reasons is it's difficult to compete with StackOverflow. However, SO seems to not have a real community aspect to it. You ask question - you get answers. If your questions doesn't fit their format, they close your thread and you're often left out to dry. Either way, the change might freshen some things up for their user base, but if that's all they're doing it won't solve their problem.

 

haha..

 

Yeah, vBulletin isn't a good script to stay with. But you do have to agree that they're perhaps looking almost for a 'magic bullet' so to speak. As if some software change will immediately revive the forums activity and bring lots of meaningful discussions.

 

Indeed. They'll have to do much, much, more than that.

 

Another large forum leaving vB.

 

It looks bad does that Discourse, I wouldn't move from vB3 to that. And it's still a traditional looking forum platform like how vB3 works. I'd have gone to something like Vanilla before Discourse due to it having a completely different style of working as a forum "comment type system". If they are looking for something very different to try and revive the forum that is.

 

I also used to be a regular, specifically the PHP Application Design that they killed. I don't bother with the forums, but I must admit that their blog content is getting better again this past year. At least for PHP...

I'm of the opinion that the migration is more of a technical one. The limitations vBulletin places on the development is huge. I was mentioned a while back that they use my VDE tool for their plugin development, but even that is nowhere near ideal for a community that size.

I do think the UX of Discourse is significantly better, but it's also much more limited in features. Perhaps that will improve with time, especially if they plan to contribute back.

 

Well he says it's open source and that tech staff at SitePoint can work freely on improving things because of it. So maybe lack of features isn't an issue if that's the case.

 

Don't blame sitepoint's issues on vBulletin -- its sitepoint and their forum management that have driven people away.

 

I don't think anyone here was blaming vBulletin.

 

This is interesting and again sad. Sad to see another brand ambassador drop the vB brand.

It is definitely not the brand vBulletin's fault. That is for sure. It is the direction it has been taken.

As for the post itself and the change, I'd like to know what Sarah meant about

(edit: I guess I'll have to ask her. Edit2: I did.)

It is obvious, most of the users don't either. How can you disagree with the basic thinking of why discourse was created and then say you want it as your platform? Puh....

And then this answer tells me the Sitepoint community is actually in trouble.

I am of the opinion, you simply can't pull the "I am the most qualified and I am the best person and I have done the most work therefore you'll just have to trust me" card, when people are concerned about change. That is not how you do change management. That is not how you lead. Sarah needs to explain why Discourse is the right choice and why it is going to make Sitepoint better and it has to make sense for those with concerns. She must sell the change to the users.

With that one post, I think I am going to have to say, Joey is most likely on to something.

Edit: This is a much better answer to the concern's of the change and a really bad whack at vBulletin the software .

Edit 2: I gave them my two cents too.

Scott

 

I'm with @CM30 on this one. The sig spammers and one liner posters that add absolutely nothing to community are the reasons I shy away from all the larger webmaster boards. It's almost like the moderators/owners are too scared of not being politically correct to do anything about the problem at hand. For a time, I moderated at a medium sized webmaster board and wound up giving it up due to all the spammers and time sink it had become. To that end, I doubt Discourse will solve SitePoint's problems.

That being said Discourse does look interesting. I like Jeff Atwood at least he's trying to make a positive change in the forum arena. What remains to be seen is if these are the changes forums need to stay competitive with the likes of Facebook.

 

Unless the Discourse team plans to quickly implement whatever the sitepoint community needs, I do not see how this can go well. IMHO the needs of a webmaster community do not match with the basic functions of discourse. Its also such a change in functionality that there will be a significant culture shock, which could cause exodus and community bleed.
I can understand the need to choose an innovative platform with a future, but it does not make sense to lose track of your basic needs.

 

I agree with both of you. Forums need a kick in the ass (in a positive sense) and they also need to fulfill the clear needs forums have also had over the years and those, which are getting more and more important now, like spam prevention.

Whether or not Discourse is a new better direction for forums is very much up for debate. The fact it is written in Ruby makes me wonder about its potential. That basically closes down the market to a much, much smaller group of takers and I really don't think its features are so fantastically new and innovative, that it will help raise its level of attractiveness. The fact is it open source helps overcome this some, but still, I really think it is based on shaky premises......

Do something a bit different, like no pagination and no page of forums and sub-forums listed, based on a very different (at the time it was started trendy) and fairly new programming language (compared to PHP) called Ruby and even base it on weak reasoning for doing something different and then try and call it a better solution or even innovative? Ehem...nope. That won't really work in my book.

I applaud Jeff's attempts, but they are still just attempts. Maybe if he can get more forums like Sitepoint to use Discourse, he might get more traction and I wish him all the luck in doing so. I just don't really see it is going to happen and even worse, if Discourse ends up being flat, sites like Sitepoint counting on that new way of doing things will most likely be investing in a new application and direction for their forum....again. That will be very painful. It might even cause too much pain?

Scott

 

Discourse actually has a lot more going for it than it's getting credit for. I've spent the last few months evaluating it for a large client migration and was pretty impressed. It's not just a bit of AJAX sprinkled onto an old forum model. The entire application is a rest API, with admin + public JS applications to interface with. The architecture seems a lot more scalable, in both performance and development efforts. It has a ways to go for features still, but it's a good start. With the announcement of their hosted service, I think we'll be seeing more and more of them popping up. Also, Ruby and PHP both came out in 1995. It's not a cool, trendy new language any more than PHP is.

I've been modifying vBulletin boards for 10 years, and have written many tools to try and modernize the process. It's a horrible experience, and large sites do migrate away once their development needs expand. I'm still confident that is the primary driver here.

 

Ok. Then that should be Jeff's premise to build the brand on. A much more scalable and easier to develop with application. However, a better user experience is still the goal and I am personally missing anything much more innovative in that respect. Maybe it isn't even possible??? And, it is only a forum application.

As for Ruby, it wasn't until a few years ago that it got any kind of real traction in the developer community from what I saw and it was on an upward swing, when Jeff started Discourse. I am sure it was that "wave" that Jeff intended to catch. Unfortunately, the wave is puckering out and Python is actually taking its place behind PHP and Java, as the third most popular programming language.

Scott

 

I think the best forum / community solution is yet to come. If your website needs to compete with stackoverflow, then its time to start developing your own thing on Django Framework or go the other direction by expanding a GWT based solution like ZK.