It is scary how long you were talking about being sick, and didnt know what is was. You definately seem less stressed lately, compared to months ago. I know it had to drive you crazy knowing "something" was going on, and sitting there wondering.
Thanks. Really it was a horrible 5 - 6 years and I don't even want to think about how I wasted the tail end of my 40s and the physical struggle was like a low grade torture for 5 years (not quite as acute as waterboarding but worse cumulatively I think ... and I don't know what are the long-term psychological impacts ... no time to ponder that now ... just happy to be feeling better and able to work and soon ramping back up sports/sex life). One positive is that Bitcoin and BCT provided an outlet that kept my drive to live going, sustained me financially, and gave me some productive base with which to rocket forward now that I am getting back to normal productivity.Btw, I think I am feeling much better today, because I got some serious urge to slam dancing when I stumbled onto
this old song. And past days I've been eating like crazy: cheese, butter, Angus beef, every 2 hours woofing down more food.
OpenShare Forum?I don't want to keep bumping this thread as it is annoying to the readers of Altcoin Discussion. So I want to get a forum rolling for OpenShare.
So I am reviewing some information about forums and I think it is also interesting to analyze this in case we will have discussion forums and comment threads on OpenShare apps.
I think we also need
a Q&A functionality, because for some topics the format of competing answers that are voted up or down is superior to a long-winded discussion. These Q&A form the basis of a Wiki.
I think we should learn from the excellently written
Building Communities with Software by Joel Spolsky who is btw the creator of StackExchange (which pisses me off with their censorship sometimes).
If you offer the “notify me” checkbox, these people will post their question, check the box, and never come back. They’ll just read the replies in their mailbox. The end.
Agreed but stated from a non-monopolistic perspective. No features which encourage users to forsake the interactivity for no justifiable reason.
Branching makes discussions get off track, and reading a thread that is branched is discombobulating and unnatural. Better to force people to start a new topic if they want to get off topic.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/web-discussions-flat-by-design/https://blog.codinghorror.com/discussions-flat-or-threaded/Branching. Agreed. I'd prefer a feature where each post has an icon where one can see a drop-down list of all the threads which branched off from that post. Ditto for the OP thread an icon to click for showing which post the thread branched from, if any.
Q. Your list of topics is sorted wrong. It should put the topic with the most recent reply first, rather than listing them based on the time of the original post.
A. It could do that; that’s what many web-based forums do. But when you do that certain topics tend to float near the top forever, because people will be willing to argue about H1B visas, or what’s wrong with Computer Science in college, until the end of the universe. Every day 100 new people arrive in the forum for the first time, and they start at the top of the list, and they dive into that topic with gusto.
The way I do it has two advantages. One, topics rapidly go away, so conversation remains relatively interesting. Eventually people have to just stop arguing about a given point.
Two, the order of topics on the home page is stable, so it’s easier to find a topic again that you were interested in because it stays in the same place relative to its neighbors.
Joel's preference seems to be better for discussion that is current events and not normative. So I'd want the option to do it both ways. For sub-forum categories which are normative, I'd want the most recently commented to be first to be the default. For current events categories, I'd prefer by default ranking by age of the OP of the thread. I think the user should also be able to change the ranking preference.
Very few people reread their post carefully. If they wanted to reread their post carefully, they could have done it while they were editing it, but they are bored by their post already, it’s yesterday’s newspaper, they are ready to move on.
Editing. I think being able to edit a post is very important, but I think if it is edited beyond say 5 or 10 minutes, then it should have icon which shows the edit history when clicked. Also posts edited within that 5 or 10 minutes should have a special highlight when page is reloaded for those who had previously loaded the page with the prior version of the post, i.e. readers should be made aware of the edits of posts they might have already read.
Q. Why don’t you show me the post I’m replying to, while I compose my reply?
A. Because that will tempt you to quote a part of it in your own reply. Anything I can do to reduce the amount of quoting will increase the fluidity of the conversation, making topics interesting to read. Whenever someone quotes something from above, the person who reads the topic has to read the same thing twice in a row, which is pointless and automatically guaranteed to be boring.
Sometimes people still try to quote things, usually because they are replying to something from three posts ago, or because they’re mindlessly nitpicking and they need to rebut 12 separate points. These are not bad people, they’re just programmers, and programming requires you to dot every i and cross every t, so you get into a frame of mind where you can’t leave any argument unanswered any more than you would ignore an error from your compiler. But I’ll be damned if I make it EASY on you. I’m almost tempted to try to find a way to show posts as images so you can’t cut and paste them. If you really need to reply to something from three posts ago, kindly take a moment to compose a decent English sentence (“When Fred said blah, he must not have considered…”), don’t litter the place with your <<<>>>s.
Quoting. I agree too much quoting is noisy (yet I quote frequently myself) and indicative of a conversation that has been tedious and pedantic. Better if the writer can compose a cogent reply without any quotations. But sometimes that is necessary, and especially for technical discussion. I quoted Joel above. I think perhaps what I would like is for quotations to be displayed in much smaller fonts and greyed (or lower contrast for colors) out. Then when the user hovers their mouse over a quotation for a second, the color returns to normal contrast until the mouse moves (even if still within the quotation rectangle). Clicking the quotation would increase the font size to normal (and color to normal contrast) until it is clicked again. That makes it more work to read quotes (either eye strain at smaller size or more hovering/clicking) but they stay out of the way when not really necessary to read them so clearly. So then the person replying has to optimize their quoting to essential quotes and/or ones that are only need for reference but aren't absolutely necessary to read. I also like that when replying to a post, there is an icon on your post which links to the post that was replied to, so then it isn't necessary to quote to indicate which post is being replied to.
Q. Why do posts disappear sometimes?
A. The forum is moderated. That means that a few people have the magick powah to delete a post. If the post they delete is the first one in a thread, the thread itself appears deleted because there’s no way to get to it.
Q. But that’s censorship!
A. No, it’s picking up the garbage in the park. If we didn’t do it, the signal to noise ratio would change dramatically for the worse ... I am pragmatic and understand that a totally uncensored world just looks like your inbox: 80% spam, advertising, and fraud, rapidly driving away the few interesting people.
Q. How do you decide what to delete?
A. First of all, I remove radically off-topic posts or posts which, in my opinion, are only of interest to a very small number of people. If something is not about the same general topics as Joel on Software is about, it may be interesting as all heck to certain people but it’s not likely to interest the majority of people who came to my site to hear about software development.
Q. Instead of deleting posts, why don’t you have a moderation scheme, where people vote on how much they like a post, and people can choose how high the vote has to be before they read it?
A. This is, of course, how Slashdot works, and I’ll bet you 50% of the people who read Slashdot regularly have never figured it out.
There are three things I don’t like about this. One: it’s more UI complication, a feature that people need to learn how to use. Two: it creates such complicated politics that it make the Byzantine Empire look like 3rd grade school government. And three: when you read Slashdot with the filters turned up high enough that you only see the interesting posts, the narrative is completely lost. You just get a bunch of random disjointed statements with no context.
I noticed that censorship on Joel's StackExchange sites causes the politics to end up in Meta. Thus I think Joel is wrong in one sense in that it is not good to remove an activity that people want to do, if you can allow it in a way that doesn't degrade the experience of the site. So I have a different proposal for how to handle it.
I also dislike noise. I often wish I could organize threads to push what I think are not very important posts to the side so they don't clutter the readers' focus. Nobody has time to read everything. Would any of us read this entire thread if we just arrived at this thread for the first time today? Also voting reflects many diverse opinions which when summed together don't necessarily make any sense. So what I'd prefer is that reader can select the preferences of the a moderator which they can select from a drop-down menu, with the thread creator as the default moderator. If they select "no moderator" then they see all the posts. So no posts actually ever are deleted, rather only hidden by the moderator. And every user is a moderator, they just aren't the default moderator which is exclusive to thread OP or blog author.
As an added level of complexity and I am not sure if I would end up liking this, I might like to experiment with users can have their own personalized list of moderators they trust, then have the option to views as moderation by the union of those moderation actions. In addition to deletion, I'd experiment with moderation of ranking of threads and rankings of any branches of discussion (note no branching within forum threads, but perhaps blog comments would have branching).
These are examples of innovations I would like to do for apps we create. And I am an idea machine that will spew out 100 ideas a day if that is our focus. Perhaps some of you too also have great ideas or even corrections/improvements on the above ideas.
Edit: also want it to support markdown.
Does anyone know of any forum software which has these features?
