I’m going to try and fire something up this week. I’ll do some research on software for it, I’m fine spending money on xenforo or vbulletin but it looks like there are quite a few options out there.
Am I the only one who is totally confused by discourse?
Maybe it's because rhe demo instance was reset way to often or something but I've never really seen a really working discourse instance. (I think both Mozilla and Canonical (has?) run one but they weren't to active either IIRC.
Anyone has examples of a working discourse community?
The subject matter may not appeal to some on HN, but here's an installation I set up at a previous employer over three years ago, that is thriving:
https://discourse.biologos.org/
No doubt that discourse is really nice software, and I will give it a go, but it does lack the “nostalgia” referred to by the original comment I replied to with this idea. All options are valid at this point though!
I think it is important to curate it, but I applaud the idea. I would say; only allow people with over a certain karma score on HN (>1000)? That way you benefit from the quite strict moderation here.
But indeed I remember the days on vBulletin forums; all my remarks against ‘you cannot make friends over 30’ that I uttered here come from there: most my current friends and one of my best friends I met on forums. It just worked well.
I think that's what mods are for. At least back in the day that's how it worked. Of course some mods will abuse their powers and just do stupid stuff but in the end that's part of what made it so fun. You had to iterate through dozens of forums and hope that yours had a fighting chance because the mods did their job properly.
Exactly that. I would explicitly allow it, esp since most have some interest in some of the topics. Even off-topic chat can be fine if it's in an extra category. The only thing to avoid is pure spam but with some threshold to sign up (e.g. verification) that can be kept relatively low.
Yes, but there were only a few people around and they were tech savvy and often entrepreneural especially in tech forums... Now when a forum gets any sort of uptake, it is jumped on by marketers and other spammers. So elitist, I guess but it was automatically back then I guess.
Good moderation feels like a better solution than invites or elitism here. Have the forum open to anyone, but be ruthless when it comes to removing low quality content or marketing spam in any form. Maybe even set things like signature links or certain aspects of the post formatting to be only accessible to those with 5 or more posts, and have any first post with a link in sent for moderator approval.
Human moderation always wins out over technical solutions and elitism.
Not to mention the social shaming of people trying to sell things is always pretty scathing on forums. In general they tended to promote good content by liberal application of both the carrot and the stick. No one wants their product associated with a 17 page thread about how product X is sold by a bunch of annoying spammers, oh and by the way for anyone interested, turns out CEO of the company shilling this product has a kink.com account looking for a strong domme in the SF area to punish him :thinking_emoji:
Free for a heavily selected group of people with internet access and specialist knowledge of how to find stuff. So: elitist in a sense of resources weighted by interest.
I think to kick things off it will be best to allow anyone to sign up and potentially lock it down in the future if things get out of hand. Usually forums have features like limiting new thread creation to users with enough karma/comments, so that can help a bit in keeping quality up.
I wouldn't set the karma threshold that high. If you want to avoid spammers, a threshold of 50-100 is likely enough. That excludes any cheap spamming attempts.
