Forums = social network killers?

There are a lot of very large websites that built their popularity by use of forums. It's been my mindset for the longest time that to be as big as them, you need to do what they do - not true at all any more.

I've only been trying to jump in the social networking craze since 2008 when I started producing some sites around my earliest ideas, and the killer has always been how the @!%$# do you integrate forums into a social network?

The answer: You don't. They are a thing of the past, and will only remain to be effective on the sites that already have an established user base. Orca forums surely aren't going to win you any points in this area either if it is in fact what you want to do.

Some of you have probably already made this realization, hell facebook realized it years ago (but still included them). I am just coming to this realization in recent months after watching the activity on my site. My members are very busy, interacting directly with each other. In the forums, not so much. Someone posts, others view, discussion dies off quickly. 

A mediated discussion is still valuable, but there has to be a better way to do it & keep the focus on a social network. 

I'm thinking a hybrid version of Dolphin's blog system is where it is at, only make the commenting more robust and encourage a forum type interaction. After all, most forum postings are members spewing random thoughts or asking simple questions. Why not encourage it through another medium and stoke the social interaction. 

Anyone share these thoughts? I am most interested because blog activity is easier to feed into the users timeline, updating their friends on what discussions they've been involved in etc (sparking more interest, organically). You would still provide a landing page, allowing the blogs to be posted under categories just like you would in a forum - now you've got the same underlying strategy being driven under two different scenarios. Traditional forum browsers can still find their way like they would normally.

Sorry for the random rambling, I'm mostly pissed that Orca is so poorly integrated with Dolphin and a complete PITA to try and modify. I also fear that though updates are promised under 7.1, forums will still be neglected.

disagree that forums are from the past...

I think focusing on forums for a general social network is a bad idea, but if your community is niche and has a central common interest as its purpose for joining, then forums can work very well.

There are plenty of very big, and very active forum sites out there, all restricted to a specific common interest. You'll find them on just about anything!

I think it's more the focus of your site that will make/break a forum, instead of providing the forum itself... also, if you are providing several ways for people to interact on a site (forums, blogs, comments, wall, chat) then it could be that there are too many options and less 'funnelling' of site traffic.

Most big forum sites simply provide news sections with no feedback areas, then a forum area where all the members 'hang out'.

Forums are alive and well. Still millions of people who want something with a little more depth than a tweet or timeline update...!

I still run a BBS...

Hell, look at Something Awful.  It's a thriving "community" and it doesn't even have a front page...

Orca is crap.  It started as a standalone script with the idea of being the first AJAX forum to work with SEO.  No need for administrators or moderators; users can have posts hidden after enough downvotes.  Self-moderating, light-weight.  But the AJAX didn't work well and self-moderation is about as effective as communism.  Some of those problems have been addressed, but the real problem is Orca itself.  BoonEx should replace it with another light-weight script.  Vanilla and PunBB come to mind.

What about sites that aren't just social networking? What about sites that focus on a specific topic, or the people in a  specific vocation?

I think you are looking at it backwards. Social networking sites do not limit or focus on any specific topic. because of this, they become overloaded with completely useless and nonsensical information. there is no way to sort that type of information except to throw it all onto one page. Sites without forums can only be a social networking site. A social site is ultimately only good for one thing. Selling advertising.

All other sites need to have a way to sort topics. The forum is far from being dead or being considered useless. There are thousands of sites on the net today that have 10's or even 100;s of thousands of users and they are ONLY a forum. Just look at any of the car repair specific sites like diesels only, etc.

The friends mod in Dolphin is also very limiting for the exact same reason.

IMHO, if you eliminate the forum, you relegate yourself to a social site who's only purpose is to build the world biggest online bullshit session.

Facebook already wins there so why waste your time?

I have been looking at punBB. I find it's concept very intriguing...

Orca has one thing going for it that no other forum does.  Is doesn't use that gawd awful BB Code.

hate to admit this,, but the only thing ning offers that i am jealous over is the forums, they are easy to use and a very simple layout, orca confuses everyone who tries to use it!

i wish there was a mod for the blogs to let you do more with them, like have the "lost blog commented" as the top spot in the rss,, and to alow html embedding on comments and such,, OR EVEN A BETTER WORKING SET OF FORUMS!

What's so confusing about Orca forum?

 I think your using a form of Orca here..

Yes, this is Orca.  How can I tell?

See above.

Orca works for a basic forum which does... posts?  But it still lacks important moderation features and control of content after it's posted.  You can't edit a sticky after it's been posted without editing the database.  There's no separation of individual groups and forums via membership levels.  It's either a public forum or a private one - no control beyond that.

I'm afraid most of you are missing the point. Yes, you can still run a a successful discussion forums website, my stance is that dolphin 7 and discussion forums are on two completely different ends of the spectrum, yet it would still be beneficial to find the perfect medium between the two.

Dolphin 7 = Emphasis on private interaction between members and making connections

Forums = Public interaction with little credibility, no emphasis on member identify and high frequency of repetitive data/content.

Your website either focuses on its members or its posted content, I have yet to see something do both while maintaining clear navigation. If you have, please feel free to post the url :)

Boonex's note system is getting a little warmer with what I'm thinking about, except the fact that they clearly state it is not intended as a discussion medium. 

After an unimpressive revamp of the orca forums in d7.1, this topic is fresh on my mind again and I can't seem to get it to flush.

I've been contemplating the use of blogs over forums more and more for one of my sites. I think it will work, and work well. Here's why:

• Blogs are tightly integrated with timeline, forums are not
• Blogs allow  a member to reflect on thoughts, post questions or ideas and still solicit a response
• New postings will syndicate across timeline/wall and notify a member's friends, encouraging further interaction (forums do not even begin to have this functionality. 
• The ability to add a cover image helps keep this intriguing, as long as it is not abused

What I've been thinking I need to do to make this work (some content already posted previously, sorry)

• Comments section needs to be redesigned to have more emphasis on who is responding, when they did it etc
• Rename blogs & associated links to forums, topics & posts or similar
• Create an overall categories list to browse on index
• The next & previous blog post links (At the bottom of  a blog post) should cycle through posts in that overall category rather than specific user
• Titling a user's blog needs to be removed or hidden

There is much more, I'm sure. But I think with a little bit of work, this module could be duplicated and become very useful for some of the niche social sites, such as my own. 

Anyone else interested in this little adventure? My abilities are somewhat limited, but I've been able to hack my way around in the past. Ideally this would be a community coordinated (free) effort/module, but I might have a little bit of budget to work with a developer if that fails.

The reason Orca is so poorly integrated with everything else is because... it's poorly integrated.  It was a stand-alone script before it was shoved into Dolphin, and it's still showing the scars from where BoonEx rammed support beams into it.  It's not written like a typical Dolphin module (e.g., blogs, articles, etc.).  It's still mostly self-contained, has its own directory structure, and has its own template system.  Before Orca can become better, it's foundation needs to be patched-up.

You've done a fine job at convincing me to completely abandon orca rather than pay through the teeth to bring it up to spec (well, my spec at least), further stoking the flame of building off of blogs or a similar module.

Most of what we need to happen is already there. Member posts a topic, it hits the timeline. Member posts a reply, it hits the timeline. 

The biggest problem I see, is that the comments system is called universally throughout the base modules. Make any changes to the format and it will be seen against videos, photos and others. This can be good and bad, depending on how you want it to work with your site. 

Why not enable a video posting to become a discussion thread? Upgrading the TinyMCE comments editor is simple enough. We just need to track additional things such as overall post count and possibly increase moderation abilities.

I can see a lot of core code changes here, but I also do not see me taking my platform beyond 7.1.

You can't say I haven't piqued your interest with this one...

Attached is what I'm proposing for a forums homepage.

Need to look at ways for a new comment within a post to bring that post to the top of the recent post list.

Well, we've been thinking about it quite a bit, and yes, it does look like BLOGS/NOTES/FORUMS/ARTICLES,etc slowly but surely converged into largely the same thing and separating them into different modules or sections of the site isn't always a good idea. Timelines, Spies, Walls are all basically attempt to merge updates from them into one flow, but very often there's not need for separate systems in the first place. 

There is, of course, some distinct differences between, say BLOGS and FORUMS, but they are not big and not very detrimental to the purpose of the site - use-cases for both overlap at about 95% of the time. So, with Dolphin 7 we recommend not using a mix of modules. Instead we suggest that either BLOGS or FORUMS should be chosen and run as the main content publishing and discussion platform. We're also about to fix this here at BoonEx as well.

I don't see any potential in integrating third-party Forum scripts - we've been there and know only too well where it leads to. In Dolphin 7 we will be maintaining current structure to make sure existing sites can continue to evolve, while in Dolphin 8 we're looking at the whole picture a bit differently there and we don't expect o be shipping overlapping modules anymore. 

Overall, great discussion and ideas (thank you for the new Forums layout recommendation, too) - saving this topic in my reading list to get back and re-evaluate. 

Ive normally opted for forums and articles when it comes to dolphins 'writing' sections.

Blogs, has lots of nice features, but Im just not keen on the default structure of the whole mod. Also, this seems to be the target module for spammers so I generally dont have it enabled.

Forums have been used, but not massively. Articles is fairly flexible with a few tweaks to the layout...

Looking forward to testing the blogs in 7.1, see if the usability is easier than 7.0.9

I guess if it is, then I may go that direction... would like to see some upgraded comments section on the blogs though as this would be the main area of response and interaction following a post... can we have a scrolling comments box, rather than having to click 'next 5 comments' and refreshing that area?... or put in the facebook style constant flow thing when you get to the bottom, the next lot loads...

Been in deep thought over this lately, especially since my community is being shaped around this. Above you'll see what I think represents an ideal social network workflow. A member posts an object of interest (it does not matter what that object is), and other members are allowed to interact with it in a number of different ways. What's important here, is that the interaction constraints remain identical no matter the object. 

Think of any forum community you've been involved in for any amount of time. You'll see a theme - people start creating new ways to post objects of interest that are not necessarily another 'discussion' post. You'll see dedicated instructional threads, dedicated photo threads, event threads and more. Dolphin has already done a wonderful job at categorizing all of these different objects of interest, and the response/interaction is indeed consistent. 

Where I feel Dolphin has come up short (but not by much), is the focus on responses to these objects of interest. I have many of these modules implemented on my site, and members almost always refrain from using the comments feature. Instead, they post the content, then create a forum thread and embed said object for a more in-depth interaction and response. This trend retracts from the social interaction of the rest of the website.

If we could provide a more intuitive response system, this platform would become incredibly robust, and more feasible to implement in niche markets on tight timelines and or budget. 

I absolutely feel that a discussion topic should be treated of the same caliber of a posted photo or video. This helps shift emphasis on the member's profile/timeline rather than encouraging them to click on Forums Spy/Recent Topics to get a glimpse of the latest happenings. 

With that said, I'll apologize for a lengthy ramble - and furthermore apologize for the color of the flowchart. Playing around with visio 2013 I did not want to get too crafty.

I have repacked Blogs into what i'll call a Discussions module. I haven't been able to make any changes other than duplicate and relabel, but it is attached if anyone wants to get creative with me.

Is the discussions conversion just relabelling or are there any other changes?

Im interested in moving towards more interactive blogs, wanting to see what 7.1 comes up with...!

 I haven't been able to make any changes other than duplicate and relabel.

I would like to start making the changes I've noted above, and I'd also like to make the comment system more robust across the board.

Good points, shnelson, and very interesting discussion, also, incidentally, a very timely one.

I've been thinking about these things and about the ways we should build D8, and what I think is important is to create a unified "reaction" system... Like you've pointed out, initial content may come in different forms and thus requires unique structure for original posts: photo(album), text post, mixed post, product, etc. Reaction to any kind of content, must utilise a system that's works similarly in all modules and is syndicated in timelines for streamlined consumption. Be it rich-comments, forum-like discussion, likes, external sharing, etc - users will get used to only ONE way to react to something and will always try to use their favourite way.  

So, we have to build a nice, useful, robust "Discuss/Promote" component, which would be attached to every kind of module, with its content showing up in Timelines. Comments in Dolphin 7.1 work somewhat like that, but, apparently, if we build them to work more like Forum posts, and have actual Forum responses work same as comments anywhere, then there would be almost no difference, technically, between, say BLOGS and FORUMS, which is good, because users would be comfortable with both, and web-masters would only separate them by goal (like, using Blogs only for team-members updates/news, and Forums for community discussions, for example).

One reason why I am personally so excited about this discussion is that this vision can potentially allow us to come up with stable, production-ready D8 sooner than we expected and with potentially more streamlined structure, that will in turn save us a lot of routine-coding time and let us concentrate on improving a few core components. Also, it looks like we already have almost everything we need to get the ball rolling. 

You don't know how excited I am to see you respond to this thread, Andrew. Honestly, this level of interaction with the development team is what keeps me on this platform and coming back here. Albeit not all bugs or enhancements are addressed quickly, but as they say: Rome wasn't built in a day.

I am looking forward to D8, especially since a lot of feedback from the community is being taken into consideration. The only set back is a lack of ETA, and my community is in dire need of some critical changes now, before my faithful members lose interest.

So, in the meantime, it appears I am in need of a coalition or guru of sorts to achieve this type of implementation in 7.1. I've been bashing my head against the mysql structure and a number of files within /inc... only to end in frustration due to lack of ability (at least tonight). I was also able to come to the conclusion that a java expert (BxDolCmts.js) is likely required :)

I would post this as a job, but the outcome is so open-ended I don't think I could nail down specific criteria up front. Again, I do have some budget for this, and I'm sure we can find additional community members that are interested in the same outcome!