Sitepoint moves to Discourse?

This is so true, especially when the content/ article discussions have absolutely nothing to do with the forum discussions. In fact, they have two completely different systems for discussion (Disqus... and vBulletin), which make users register/ sign-in twice, if they want to participate in the "community". But then, what should be a whole, single community ends up being two communities really, with users with possibly different usernames, two different notification systems, different moderation tools, no data convergence for discovery of new content, etc. Not really an optimal user or admin/ mod experience at all.

Scott

 

Hey guys,
I've been avoiding this thread because no one especially likes hearing others bag something they've spent a lot of time working on, but this is the kind of feedback I was hoping for on my own forums, so I hope you don't mind me chiming in here. I value your insight and I'd be interested in your feedback, once you understand the full story. There are several things that I need to clarify because I get the feeling that you all think I'm jumping into this decision lightly, or with false hope. That is not the case, and the misunderstanding is causing some of the feedback to be less than constructive.

Firstly, I am in total agreement with those of you that claim that the quality of posts has gone downhill over the last few years. It has and it's an ongoing battle. The company isn't overly concerned because our traffic is higher than it has ever been. I feel differently, of course, because healthy engagement is down and it is harder to recruit staff – a sure sign that things aren't healthy.

I need to make it abundantly clear that the move to Discourse is not an attempt to fix that issue. We want to move off vB for all of the reasons that I have already stated in my announcement thread.

I guess I would also like to make it clear to those of you that think we need new community managers with a clear vision and the drive to see it through, that I do have both those things. I guess I need to spell that vision out more clearly, so I'll attempt to do that here so that you understand my rationale. At that point, if you still think I'm going in blindfolded, I'd welcome your input. The decision to go to Discourse is final, and I won't be changing that, but I definitely have an open mind about strategy and I'm not too proud to take advice on board.

My primary reasons for choosing Discourse is that it addresses more of the issues that you have highlighted in this thread than any of the other options that I have come across.

Those issues are:

1. The quality of posts (the SEO crap, the broken English (which I don't have an issue with in and of itself, but it does add to the noise), the repetitive questions)
2. The disconnect between our content site and the forums
3. The lack of specialist subjects (as a result of forum merging)

We have post quality guidelines
We have automated fluff moderation tools
We have removed the key fluff magnets (the SEO forum etc)
We have a large staff that spend a lot of time cleaning up crap
Those things aren't working. What Discourse has to offer is user-driven moderation, allowing voting and flagging of posts, and automatically hiding content when it meets a threshold. If two people flag a post, the OP gets the opportunity to edit it. It is hidden until they do. If two more people flag it, it gets removed altogether.
There are also user Trust Levels, which sandbox new users, freeing up my staff that spend all their time killing bots and spammers to be more active within the community – raising the quality of conversations.

Now obviously that won't do anything to stimulate healthy engagement in the short term, but this is a medium term goal. The turnaround will happen in time. So assuming the signal to noise ratio begins to adjust, we need to make some other changes to address issues 2 and 3. Discourse plays a key role there too.

There is this WordPress plugin that lets you use Discourse as the community engine for a WordPress blog, which is what SitePoint is. We plan to expand on that with our own plugin that will go the other way (WordPress comments into Discourse). By introducing that cohesion I hope to we'll go some way towards attracting the committed, more engaged readers of our content over into our community.

So the last thing that has been raised too many times for me to ignore is the removal of the specialist subjects (like PHP App dev). There are a couple of reasons for that happening. Firstly, I introduced that sub-forum as an experiment and I wasn't sure that it worked. It didn't get a lot of traffic and questions frequently went unanswered for days. We had a huge number of sub-forums and that number was ever growing. In an effort to cull the spam and fluff we looked at two options. One was blocking all Indian IP addresses (which I decided against for a number of reasons) and the other was culling a large number of forums to focus our energies. I admit in retrospect that that was quite damaging and given the time again, I would make a different call. That is closely related to one of the things that I am finding the most cumbersome with our forums in their current incarnation. If we want to drop a forum or add subjects, we effectively restructure the forum. There is no flexibility. With Discourse, we are introducing a tagging system that will give us the ability to quickly and easily add and deprecate topics. We can introduce specialist subjects for those that are interested, without it blowing out our structure or making the forums so diverse that they can't be navigated comfortably by beginners.

So in summary, no, I don't expect a platform change in itself to be our Hail Mary, but this particular platform change coincides with a number of strategic changes and it also gives us the opportunity to have full control over our software so that we can customise as we need to, rather than being hamstrung by legacy issues. I hope that goes some way towards helping you understand my rationale.

 

Thanks. Yeah, I absolutely do. Aside from the fact that it's important for my career, I have a personal stake in it, in that I'm passionate about this community – I've been on staff for almost a decade and have watched it ebb and flow. I'm not prepared to walk away without a fight.

 

Yes Wayne was community manager running sitepoint forums when I was there too as a 'Sitepoint Guru' (~1999). Both of us ended up at Jelsoft around same time too heh. I'm still a member on sitepoint forum although not active :o

Welcome Hawk ! On the fence myself about Sitepoint move to Discourse seeing as I tried Discourse myself on my Centmin Mod Nginx stack. I prefer node.js based NodeBB given the choice of non-PHP alternatives as I like that it has integration with node.js based Ghost Blogging platform I also use i.e. http://community.nodebb.org/category/13/nodebb-blog + http://blog.nodebb.org

 

He was definitely admin, I'm not sure about community manager, but that was just before my time on staff.

Yeah, time will tell. Thanks for the welcome.

 

Your conversion to Discourse is something I'll be following with interest and I wish you luck with it. Like eva2000, I prefer NodeBB as an alternative to the more traditional forum platform and I'm a little undecided about Discourse but it's refreshing to see an attempt to provide something different.

 

Hey HAWK, nice to see you on Admin Talk. Indeed, from what I can tell in this post, you definitely seem to have to the right attitude needed to save Sitepoint's forums. I'll respond to each of your points one by one...

I agree. But I will admit that to be honest, it's not just a Sitepoint issue. Many, MANY webmaster forums seem to have a major issue with low quality fluff/spam posts recently, to the point that I've seen some die out entirely because the crap posters drove off the dedicated members.

I do have to admit I'm a bit surprised at one thing here though. You've got nofollow on all member links on your forum, and yet the 'SEO specialists' still try and post garbage there? I find that odd given how another webmaster site I know (with a near equally sized memberbase) lost about half its activity (and about 90% of the spammers) simply by stopping them getting page rank for their signature links.

Oh well, moving on...

Because vBulletin is doomed might be the best reason to give here. It has no future, so it's basically pointles staying with it any longer.

Your point here is reasonable, although a later point you make about management kind of makes me question how successful you'll be.

My primary reasons for choosing Discourse is that it addresses more of the issues that you have highlighted in this thread than any of the other options that I have come across.

Those issues are:

1. The quality of posts (the SEO crap, the broken English (which I don't have an issue with in and of itself, but it does add to the noise), the repetitive questions)
2. The disconnect between our content site and the forums
3. The lack of specialist subjects (as a result of forum merging)

We have post quality guidelines
We have automated fluff moderation tools
We have removed the key fluff magnets (the SEO forum etc)
We have a large staff that spend a lot of time cleaning up crap
Those things aren't working. What Discourse has to offer is user-driven moderation, allowing voting and flagging of posts, and automatically hiding content when it meets a threshold. If two people flag a post, the OP gets the opportunity to edit it. It is hidden until they do. If two more people flag it, it gets removed altogether.
There are also user Trust Levels, which sandbox new users, freeing up my staff that spend all their time killing bots and spammers to be more active within the community – raising the quality of conversations.

I'm not sure that's going to help things to be honest. I mean, do you know why Stack Overflow's system works so well?

Because the members on the site are generally knowlegeable and know what's a 'good' or 'bad' post.

I'm not sure the same can be said of Sitepoint's current userbase. Some of them are great people for sure, but... how well do you think the one line posters and seo spammers are going to do at flagging inappropriate content?

I suspect the answer will be 'they'll choose poorly'. Because it's not hard to make a post that LOOKS (to an untrained eye) like legitimate content but actually says nothing of value. It's not just 'this is short, so it's meaningless fluff'.

http://nintendo3dscommunity.com/blo...uigis-mansion-dark-moon-article-ever-written/

Note the article I'm talking about in this blog entry. To someone who doesn't know much about gaming, the article would seem like perfectly reasonable and interesting content. To someone who does?

They realise the 'writer' just took a template and changed a few words. What a webmaster community needs to be successful is simple;

They need to be able to look at posts made about website design/development and know which actually make any sense in the slightest. Can enough people on Sitepoint do that at this moment in time?

You assume it'll happen in time. There's a distinct difference between what's guaranteed to occur and what might possibly occur. You need a lot more time and effort than you think to get these forums successful again.

An excellent decision. Perhaps not the be all and end all (you need to realise to post more of the content exclusively on the forums, post more community related news/info/events and realise that content itself isn't king for a forum community), but it's better than having two different discussion systems like you do now.

Finally, I'll just talk about some issues you didn't mention the above post:

1. You need to be very careful with forum software switch overs in general. Trust me here, I've seen hundreds of forums completely die because they changed software, and the jump from vBulletin to Discourse is an even bigger one than usual. You will need to manage this carefully, try and bring as much of the current visual styling over as possible and generally be prepared for the wrath of a good few hundred or even thousand members, since I can practically guarantee the change over will not go by quietly.

2. Read up on as many forum management tips as you can. The articles here:[/QUOTE]

http://admin-talk.com/articles/

On other admin sites:

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/articles.php?

http://www.anotheradminforum.com/forum/17-member-articles-about-forums/

On Patrick O Keefe's Managing Communities (he also has a free book you can download):

http://www.managingcommunities.com/

and on Richard Milligan's Feverbee site:

http://www.feverbee.com/2013/02/how-to-build-an-online-community.html

Are an absolute godsend for people involved in this kind of thing. And trust me, you'll need them. Reviving Sitepoint is almost like launching a new forum in regards to the skills required.

3. I heavily disagree that IPB and XenForo are just 'clones of vBulletin' (having got multiple licenses of both myself), but that's neither here or there.

 

I find this all very interesting... it seems that the overriding reasoning behind the scenes to move to Discourse is rails. I've never really been that interested in Discourse, so it will be educational to say the least to watch what happens over at my old stomping grounds.

I'd have to say I disagree that the "fluff posting" is the reason Sitepoint's community has declined so much. I was shocked, shocked I say! though, to go over there today and see less than ten members were logged in at the moment I arrived. Back when I was a regular, there would be hundreds of members logged in.

For me, Sitepoint lost my interest when they gutted the community marketplace. They made a great new business out of Flippa, for sure, but it was at the expense of the community. No doubt the business side of it well outweighed the community side though and I'm sure they 'd make the same decision over again.

I also think they've gotten too oversensitive about the "fluff posting" problem. Sure enough I'd be unhappy if my forums were crowded with SEO people from India, but I wouldn't strike out a crusade against "fluff posting" I'd fight the spammers from India. Oh yea, I already do that and while the Indian SEO hordes that attack my forum are no doubt smaller than the Indian SEO hordes attacking Sitepoint, my resources are infinitesimal compare to theres as well.

Sometimes regular members want to make short posts with little or no value in the content, discouraging that is a sure way to kill your community.

I do agree wholeheartedly that in order to keep your community alive you need to flee vBulletin. Sooner or later. Some forums are still going strong with it. I've finished converting all of mine away from vBulletin. I was on vBulletin for ten years, it wasn't easy to leave. Whether or not a move to Discourse will help Sitepoint's community is going to be interesting to see. I'm extremely skeptical about the self-moderation aspect of the software. If you feel that you're being overrun by members who add no value to your community, what makes you think they won't quickly learn how to vote down the good stuff to make their "fluff" look better?

 

Hopefully, the number of "good" users outweighs the number of "unwanted" users considerably and thus the behavior of posting is automatically "guided" (for a lack of a better word) in a more positive direction.

But in general, you are right. Any system can be abused. Being that as it may, handling the abuse of the system (a self-moderation system) is much easier than the actual abuse it is trying to avoid (bad posting/ fluff posting/ spam / etc.).

Also important IMHO, the system's rules and results must be very clear for everyone. In other words, if a self-moderation system is in place, it must be clear to the users what can and will happen, if they do things against the system and also when they abuse the system. This alone, the knowledge of rules and punishment, are necessary in order to uphold any form of discipline.

Scott

 

Well Scott, I guess I've become overly cynical from working with forums all these years. It just doesn't take that many people to ruin a good thing. And, I do wish the best to Sarah, it's not her fault that her bosses are scoundrels, she's always been very sweet IMO. For sure I'll be watching for the results to see how things work out after the conversion to Discourse.

 

And I think your market place thing brings up another point about forums, sites and successes.

Namely, that it's very, very hard to maintain the same level of activity once you start splitting bits of the community off into different websites.

Kind of reminds me of the situation at Mario Fan Games Galaxy, where they split the forums into two sites to try and remove the general chat for the main forum... and basically had both sides near instantly die out.

 

Thanks for your words. Apologies for my late response, I thought I was subscribed to the thread so I wasn't actively monitoring it.

Agreed, and it's refreshing to hear someone else say it. It's definitely not just us, but that doesn't change the fact that it is us.

Ah, but it's not them that are complaining...

But TBH, I don't know that it will work. I don't know anything for sure, except that it's not working now so I have to try something new.

Yup, definitely. The good news is that I'm a professional freelance CM. This is what I do full time and it's what I'm paid to do. So while my primary motivation is my love of the community, I'm not doing it out of the good of my heart, it pays the bills.

Much appreciated. Patrick is actually a personal friend of mine and I have a lot of respect for his work. I've done a couple of workshops with Rich as well. He's very numbers focussed, but it's thanks to him that I'm studying social psych. He certainly knows his stuff.

In good news, I can do that. It's all part of the job.

Hmmmm, I agree. I'm not sure that I said that they are, or am I missing your point.

Anyway, in summary, thanks for your feedback. I appreciate the constructive nature of it.

Because there is no down-voting. There is liking and flagging.

And thanks for your kind words Peter, I had quoted them but for some reason this forum won't let me paste, undo or redo so I lost them. But I genuinely appreciate the good wishes.

 

You might have guessed by my terminology that lurking on Reddit has poisoned me to the "down vote" or "flagging" or however you want to call it. It just takes one guy with a bot and a grudge to really mess with the flow of discussions when you can down vote or flag a post into oblivion. But like I said, it's just the skeptic in me and it will be great to see you make it succeed.

 

Ah right. I didn't realise we were talking about the same thing. I had in mind the down-voting that is visible on the UI. But yeah, time will tell. Thanks for your support.

 

Usually, you could have an awards system, which would first give the user the permission to rate posts by getting a certain number of votes/ ratings themselves first. A user can also usually (in a smart system) only down vote / rate a post once. So, with those two "rules/ procedures", you can effectively thwart any bots or users with a grudge. etc. The only thing it won't stop is cliques of users mobbing other single users. But I say, if you have this issue, your community leadership is the issue.

Scott

 

I don't know, we're talking here about another forum changing things to try and pick up activity. But same thing is happening on all admin forums I visit recently, all of them.

 

Shawn uses something like that on Digitalpoint's forums. I don't recall the specifics, but it's something along the lines of you must get five likes on your posts before certain features are opened up. I think it's the marketplace (which is quite active there) that everyone wants to get into. So, you get a lot of posts by people pandering for likes, and posts from people asking how to get likes, etc. Seems to me the South Asian people are the worst there too. I'd be curious to hear Shawn's @digitalpoint input on how that's working.

 

I think that admin forums are a bit of a different case. Forum admins is a much smaller market than the market that Sitepoint goes after. But, with forum admins, every single person is the type of person who would be actively posting on a forum (why else would they be a forum admin?), whereas Sitepoint's market only a fraction of the market would typically be an active forum member. Also, forum admins naturally would want to create their own forum, and we have more forum admin forums than the market can support. Add to that the idiosyncrasies (I'm trying to be polite here) of the owner of the largest admin forum, and you can easily see why the forum admin market is so balkanized.