DailyKos Layout

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Have you guys thought about using the DailyKos software? It's really Cool how it allows users to rate posts and the layout of the DailyKos site is really visually organized and full of visibility into different sections. Plus there is always the central daily Open Thread where people can check in and see what the hot topics for the day are.

Daily Kos isn't a software as far as I'm aware. I uses a blog style known as 'collaborative publishing'. The CMS of this is called Scoop.

I would into this a bit more before I form an opinion.

I do think we should be moving away from the traditional forum format, yes. Whether alex will be interested is another matter.

I would be happy to make up a pitch -- software requirements, design layouts and what each feature provides, etc. Like a powerpoint presentation.

Scoop is perl. Going by how hacked up this forum is, and how many bugs are still outstanding they have barely mastered PHP.

Personally I would like a format that is clean and uncluttered but powerful under the hood. It thinks you could have some of the features you mentioned, but also use of Textile/markdown in place of bbcode. Another feature I like is snap/track backs for quotes.

Personally I don't think DailyKos way would transcribe well for this site. Some features yes but to copy the format in entirety wouldn't serve the support forum purpose.

Also scoop doesn't seem well supported. According to their ->archives<- no developments since 2006. Personally I don't see what is so special about it. There is nothing especially terrible about it, but it isn't amazing. Considering it is not perfectly fit for purpose why not find a better match before you adapt? Also I would like less cluttered still.

DailyKos' diary feature is great... and they post new diary names in kind of a marquee that has the last few new diaries created/updated. They also have diary searches and categories using tag (keyword) lists that you enter for your diary. So if someone searches on a healthcare issue, like "cognitive behavior therapy" the diaries come up separately from the other comments.

The ability to +/- rate people's comments are just great. I don't like that people who get a lot of negatives get kicked off, because that tends to be more about politics than whether what they said was true or not. But it is nice to be able to give a "+" when you really like a comment. The people who put up diaries (which are really special-interest pages, and you can have a total of I think 3 max), can put up a "tip jar" which lets people give them a "+" if they like the diary and got use out of it. So people like to accumulate a lot of points for being meaningful authors. It's also fun to watch people who are funny or who add relevant comments to a thread get a lot of points. What I don't like about DailyKos' point system is all the negativity and harassment from getting negative scores from the "-" scores. They call people who get a lot of negative points "trolls" and ban them from the site. I think that is ugly and they impose thought policing and group viewpoints on people. But the positive point scoring is really fun.

They have a section for a daily open thread, that usually restarts every day. Because Wrongplanet.net is worldwide, it would probably be best to just keep a rolling list of the last X to get started. Then DailyKos has a list of threads that start under certain subject headlines, like Wrongplanet does.

Then they have content authors who get the chance to post article-like features that are current-event or educational type content. So the whole site looks like an online magazine with a lot of threads all over, but one that all the members can contribute to depending on their level of engagement and seniority.

some of those feature are good, but not entirely unique so you could have them anywhere.

tags are great. Pretty much any publishing software worth its salt has it. Make everything taggable and you are better indexed for searches. However there is a problem with community tagging in inevitably people don't use the same tags when they should (different spellings, etc). This is not the end of the world but it works better if it doesn't get out of hand. It is up to the interface to engorge recycling of tags.

rating depends, it think need work, can cause problems. This site is moderated in a traditional manner so I would be a 'culture shock' to say the least.

I can see how rating posts works if there are thousands of current contributors. I like Reddit for that as it puts the most interesting posts to the top (usually). But on WP where there are not so many current contributors I could see factions forming. Especially on PPR all the atheists would + each other and negate the believers and vice-versa.

There could be a tendency towards cliquiness too with "friends" promoting each others posts with little regard for the contents. Another thing to bear in mind is that a lot of people on here are not thick-skinned so some negative rankings could make them feel really miserable and perhaps not post again.

I like wp the way it is.

Snap.

WP is not a games site, a dating site, a technophile site, a fad site, ...

While it has some shortcomings, I feel that it performs its function (a support site) fairly well, and fairly simply. Complexity for complexity's sake just isn't appropriate.

====

"Oh look! This WP place works pretty good... let's change it to something completely different!" ... no thank you.

Wow, you're just all over the place.

It is a fallacy to say that a modern, well-designed collaborative-website layout is some kind of fad or technophile thing. And a dating or games site is usually not a collaborative content site.



What I was describing wasn't "complexity" because the features already exist in rudimentary form already here (but not presented in an optimal way). And features that have functionality, or a layout that adds navigability and functionality, has nothing to do with "complexity for complexity's sake" You are just throwing phrases around that have no real intellectual connection to the issue. User interface and website design is not about complexity.



That doesn't resemble what I said at all.

You are applying no meaningful criteria to the things you say. You're just spouting one canned stereotype after another and throwing phrases around, without any real idea how they apply to user interface or website design.

If you're going to pan someone ideas so rudely, you should at least try to make sure that your knee-jerk stereotype labels even apply to their notions.

WP has a website design that looks just like an old bulletin board from the 1980's. And if you think it's only supposed to be a "support site" then that's a low goal that doesn't match the tagline. Look at the tagline in the banner.

Not that I know why I've bothered, but I downloaded the current Scoop release.

It doesn't look too thrilling, as it seems to be littered with comments like "You will need to either know a lot about Apache or be prepared to learn. If you don't and don't want to, there are a few companies that will host a Scoop site for you." and it doesn't run on Apache 2. Actually, I didn't much like the "tone" of the documentation.

Also, as it's written in Perl, whereas phpBB is PHP, there would be a learning problem there.

At least both use MySQL, so the database might be transferable, but somehow I doubt that is would be very easy, plus Scoop doesn't seem too thrilled at the prospect of large databases, and WP has nearly two million posts to transfer. From Scoop's installation documentation: "Once the database indexes get too large for available memory, performance goes all to hell and one person on dialup can DoS the site easily." and "A dual 800MHz PIII/1Gb RAM can run a site that gets between 70 thousand and 90 thousand hits per day and has a 450Mb database."

I was tempted to install mod_perl and whatever else it needs, to see what it ran like, but I don't particularly want to run an extra, old Apache 1.3.41 just to avoid the hassle of getting Scoop to work on the Apache 2.2.8 I am using at present.

I looked at http://www.dailykos.com
It's pretty.
I attempted to find my way around it.
I gave up.

I agree with lau (sort of). There isn't anything terribly wrong with dailykos, but it isn't comparable at all. However there are some important issue which ephemerella has (perhaps inadvertedly) brought to the for. I will discuss in due course.

Personally my problem with the current interface now isn't that it is too simple, it is that it is not simple enough. Even the more current version of phpBB is a tad less cluttered but not real. There are many better ones. PHP has the largest range of free forums software out there.

Vanilla looks very uncluttered looking but has the sort of features that people might want
http://getvanilla.com/

Try the "Watch Vanilla in Action" screen casts on the side to see how intuitive and simple it is.

This is what the lussumo community looks like:
http://lussumo.com/community/

I'm not a vanilla fanboy. I haven't actually used it, but it is an example of the types of forum software I have heard about that don't have an overly complex interfaces but are powerful enough under the hood. The customizable features per user will be popular, but notice it doesn’t get in the way of usability.

Ephemerella mentioned some features that are not only supposed to be for the human user but also help the machine users such as search engines better index the site. It is a delicate balance between the two as allways. You don’t want to loose one over the other.

Bulitin boards/forums, whatever you want to call them, all suffer from the same problem problem: They are not easily indexed. They generate masses of noise. One thing they do have is plenty of new content, too much of it in fact, because is not fairly well ordered content like wikis, and blogs. That is why there is a point to be made on interface/format, if change how your users behave and content is used, it will in turn will change how you community grows via indexing If you are attentive to how a search engine indexes a forum you may, for instance, wish to instruct the robots not to index and follow links that people wouldn’t want to land on, such as an edit post page, which currently turn up in searches on this site.

Of course I am talking about the subject of ‘relevance’. Relevance is important to human internet users and important to search engines for this very reason. One of the reasons why Google is so successful is their algorithm is better at weeding out the wheat from the chaff than their competitors. That means if a site is harder to index they will get a lower rating overall. The majority of pages on a forum get a 0 rating, in other words they will not turn up in web searches at all. This is not a problem in itself, kind of you want it to be this way. The problem is *what* is indexed. If you get threads that are indexed that are several years old, and new ones are not getting indexed then obviously there is a problem. You will be rewarded by helping google index your site better, by getting a higher rating, and therefore the users will be rewarded by getting access (in the first place) to a more useful resource. It is too broad an area to discuss SOE one post, but it is true that some of the feature such as ‘taggables’ were invented to aid the flow of relevant information for the benefit of humans and machines alike. People like bogs because they tend to contain in-depth information without as much promotional crap and span you get on other sites. That is why Google has a dedicated blog search and not a dedicated forum search. If people search for blogs on subject they are more likely to find what they want. Same goes for the book search. So that is why newer forum softwares are borrowing ideas from other community sites such as wiki, blogs, etc.

Coming up with your own SEO features can be time consuming. Fortunately many of the better forum software include these titbits as standard, and also there will be add-ons that are not just for cosmetic reasons.

Google likes it if the page refers to what the person is looking for, that the address (url) contains those words, that the header tags (title) contain those words and that those words are elsewhere in the body in a non-spammy natural way. Like so:

http://lussumo.com/community/discussion ... tachments/

1. url containing the topic title
2. h1 tags contain topic title
3. text follows directly underneath with relevant information