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Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Any large community has these problems. This is the advantage to using forum engines that allow non-anonymous upvotes/downvotes over a naive mail-list - people can silently agree and separate the wheat from the chaff, and consensus becomes far more visible. You can even give the important contributors greater "weight" to the ups/downs (this is not a democracy, contributors are worth more).

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All the "forum" software that I have seen (opposed to more "ephemeral discussion" software like HN/Slashdot/Reddit) provides such a goddamn awful reading/browsing/discoverability experience that any benefits it may have over mailing lists are completely lost. Just for starters, mailing lists allow the discussion to thread (as do sites like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit) and don't force you to use a shoddy web interface that shows you only a few dozen posts on a single page. If I have to scroll to the bottom of a page and click a link that says "513", I am having a bad day.

I have never seen a large open-source project that uses "forums" in a way that doesn't impose massive overhead. Without fail, forums for open source projects are dreadful while mailing lists are, with a few notable exceptions, pleasant. When I am looking for information about a project and discover that all the project officially has is a forum, my heart sinks; it ranks up there with finding out the project is still hosted on sourceforge or a mega/rapidshare/whatever clone.

Every time I'm forced to use a forum for something, I wish usenet hadn't succumbed to spam & binary warez. Many of the clients from 20 years ago have more (useful) features than modern forums.

It's probably about time to reinvent it again, tunneled over Websockets with a Flat Responsive html5 Retina-Aware Interhyperface or something.

I've always wanted to see a nested-discussion system with upvotes/downvotes that does the kind of seamless no-F5 updating you see on facebook.

Wouldn't that mean that as you're reading a comment it could suddenly start moving up or down the screen? That'd make it pretty hard to read the stuff tailored for shills/fanboys/antifanboys...oh you may be onto something..

Any reinvented Usenet should be client agnostic, otherwise it is just going to eventually succumb to the same problems that we already have with web forums.

In which case it will eventually succumb to the problem of RSS - the biggest client will decide to drop it in favor of moving to a proprietary system.

(Well I suppose that is what you get for using a webclient that you are not paying for....)

What is the alternative here though? Instead of making it client agnostic, make it not client agnostic? How does that not make the situation even worse? Being client agnostic means that it doesn't matter if one particular client is discontinued. That is practically the entire point of being client agnostic...

Any solution that will be viable in the long-term needs to be decentralized and client agnostic. Otherwise you are not reinventing Usenet, you are just reinventing web forums poorly.

Edit: Aaaah, I need more sleep.

@jlgreco

I was actually just griping.

I honestly don't understand why everybody uses phpBB. The OSS project that I was thinking of when I made this post (zero-k.info, a small FOSS rts) rolled their own for just the reasons you described - it's primitive in some ways but at least it doesn't page.

I'm not all that happy with mailing lists. Mail clients generally think of a "thread" as a list, which works OK for a back and forth discussion between two people, or for a discussion among a small group of people that are focused on a narrow problem. For a thread that gets big (in participants or in scope), that tends to suck. A tree is a better representation.

A second problem with mailing lists is that unless you keep old messages, you generally have to go to some horrible web-based archive.

Why not use an NNTP server? Newsreaders are great at handling threads, whether they are simple linear threads like those suited for email, or massive trees with dozens of participants and many side discussions.

Trees is indeed what I mean by "threads". Email naturally does it, though perhaps some clients have poor support for displaying it nicely. The linear "list" view of "threads" is what forums call "threads" and is exactly what I do not like.

Those web-based mailing list archives, while usually unstyled and therefore "ugly", are well-indexed by search engines, easy to navigate, fast, and uncluttered. They are not perfect, but they offer a much better browsing/reading experience than standard web forums.

Going back to NNTP would be idea. I don't know how we actually do that en-masse though.

Gmane has NNTP feeds for all their mail list archives: http://gmane.org/features.php

I like the Discourse approach. http://www.discourse.org/

Instead of nested replies, it encourages "Creating new threads linking back to a post", which I find to be way more orderly than "conversation trees". They're also aiming for feature-parity with mailing lists, allowing people to participate effectively with threads by e-mail alone.

He's not looking for up/down votes. He's looking for a discussion. Which well-meaning participants in an open source project should be able to have with some civility.

You can find discussion greatly facilitated when everyone has the power to silence the imbeciles by down-voting them into oblivion.

I agree that technical solutions help. But they will never be a real solution. The eager troll will find a way around them. The real problem is a lack of strong leadership and stewardship. There is no BDFL setting the tone and punishing those who don't toe the line. Or maybe there is and this is the result. Ha!

For a long time I've thought that rather than absolute up/down votes, collaborative filtering might work better.

I've tried to drum up attention to it before now:

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/15581427232/self-...

The problem is the mailing list is open to anyone and the majority of people on the list should be providing input.

There are moderated lists. When someone gets out of hand give them a temporary ban, and tell everyone why there were banned. People will learn that if they want to participate they will have to behave. After time, when the community scares away the trolls, they can loosen the moderation rules. There are plenty of communities that self moderate after having a strong leader show them what was socially acceptable and what was not.

It's not necessarily about misbehaving. You can "behave" and yet still derail a discussion or provide no useful input. I'd say there wasn't terrible uncivil about the internals list.

But it's less like a technical discussion list and more like an open forum. The signal to noise ratio is pretty low.

Why not put RFCs in a special issue tracker?

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