I’ve decided to come, blinking and yawning, out of blogging semi-retirement today for a very special reason. I’ve had my head buried in IP.Board 3.0.0 for months now and I’ve had little time to look at much else. Let alone talk at length about it. But today, that changed.
Before I begin. I must make it quite clear that I’m removing my “IPS, Inc.” hat for this blog entry. I’m not writing as the developer of IP.Board. I’m writing this blog entry as a guy who’s been churning out forum software for ten years.
To re-iterate: What follows does not represent the viewpoint of Invision Power Services, or the viewpoint of the lead Developer of IP.Board. It is purely a personal opinion. Personal. Not professional. Glad we got that settled.
I debated writing this blog entry using vague terms and beautiful metaphors, but I really don’t have the time so you’ll have to do with what follows:
There seems to be a growing trend for forum software developers to try and cram in “social networking” tools. Specially vBulletin as per a recent announcement. In my opinion, this is taking forum development in the wrong direction.
It’s a bit first base to look at Facebook and think “Wow, that would be awesome to have that on my forum”. And it would indeed be awesome to have that on your forum. But it’s never going to happen. And this is the point I think that these forum developers have missed entirely.
Facebook is a huge success because it’s a single website community. All Facebook users connect via one URL and that is the critical difference.
Forums are like little islands of content. Simply adding half-baked”networking” tools does not allow these islands to connect. In fact, with whom are you networking with on a forum? Other members? Isn’t that what topics, posts and private messages are for? I don’t see any value in allowing members to create Social Groups within that islander community. What purpose does it serve? It just fractures the community into smaller pieces. This is anti-social networking
I, contrary to belief, have friends. Some of whom I only converse with online. I enjoy nothing more than inventing hilarious status updates and uploading photos to my Facebook profile knowing that everyone I’m “networked” with can see them and reply to them.
I also belong to several forums. Now, I can go to Forum X and upload a few photos but only the members from Forum X can see them. This means I have to repeat the process for every community I belong to if I want all of my forum friends to see them. That is why it is stupid to invest any more time on these tools.
I bet you’re probably thinking something like “Well, hold on Matt. Doesn’t IP.Board have some social networking tools, like Blog and Gallery? What about the friends list and updated profile view in IP.Board 2.2?”.
Yes. It is true that we were the first board to sell blog and gallery add-ons. But they were never an attempt to introduce real social networking. There is definitely value in having galleries and blogs within an walled community and that is how the products have been designed; to allow user’s to create and manage their own photo galleries that are relevant to that community.
The only way you can get away with using the term “social networking” is if all IP.Boards were networked allowing you to share content across multiple sites. Now that would be awesome.
Our main focus for IP.Board 3.0.0 hasn’t been to stuff it full of hastily thought out, zeitgeist inspired, additions. It has been to rewrite the code-base to make use of PHP 5. To improve code re-use to cut down on bugs. To create a stable framework. To re-write the interface to make it more appealing and user-friendly. To cement our feature set by making small but important changes.
In short, to make using forums better. That is where our time and energies have been invested and I think it’s a good investment for our future.
That is, of course, just my opinion. It’s winter and I’m cold. Bring on the flames!
{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
The other thing to remember is social networks are by definition user-centric. Forums are by definition not, they are post/topic centric. There is room for some overlap, as IPB 2.x and earlier versions of vB demonstrated, but IMO as soon as you make ’social networking’ your focus, you cease to be a forum. Forums still have a huge uptake on the interwebs, and I think any company that ignores the fundamentals of a forum in order to do social networking is playing a risky game.
I’m sure this will come back to bite me in future :p
I use IPB to run a pretty successful community (around 150k UV per month), but what I do miss is real “portal”. A nice way to push the good threads on the “homepage” (hooo, so 90’s), a real good way to write “news”. All the other tools (PM / the way the forum works) are perfect.
I’m soon forced to leave IPB because I simply can’t publish / blog / you name it, in a simple way. I can’t change dates, I cant change hours, I can’t wrap text & images easily… Automatic just bought a commenting system for wordpress, but for me the best comment system IS out there. Forums are fantastic. I just want a way to mix blog / news / community news AND ipb.
Make it happen Matt. I can even write you a design doc in horrible english. (sorry, I’m just french
). And yes, you need to offer simple ways to use ads in the forum. We do need to pay for food sometimes. Or just servers…
Before writing this comment, let me point out the I actually consider(ed?) myself at the vBulletin side of the fence. For reasons which are pointless me explaining. However, I have to say… I whole-heartedly agree.
It appears the good old days of innovation have stopped, and the vBulletin team have resorted to giving up with forums and moved on to half-baked useless features. The social networking on vBulletin is completely useless. It has introduced highly customisable profile pages… when no-one uses them anymore! Facebook saw how horrible they were and made things much more strict.
There are millions of ways to continue to innovate forum software, and I haven’t seen vBulletin innovate in over a year. I’m slowly starting to dislike vBulletin more and more. I admire the way you are trying new things and trying to lead the way.
I think you have hit the nail on the head there and fully agree.
Cafeine, feel free to email your concepts to matt@invisionpower.com. We always listen.
I have a sneaking suspicion that vB have invested so heavily in ’social networking’ features for 3.8 rather than focus on development of their new codebase (v4) because they feel that we’re going to go the same way in IPB 3.0.0. They want to beat us to the punch.
The truth is that we’re really not heading in that direction for the reasons outlined in my blog entry.
“I don’t see any value in allowing members to create Social Groups within that islander community. What purpose does it serve? It just fractures the community into smaller pieces. This is anti-social networking”
Segregation, racism, religion, politics… you could very well say it’s a way to add the worst in people from the real world to forums, I’ve actually believed this for a long time with “forum clubs”, and it’s a reason I never allowed them on my site.
Really, I agree with everything you said.
no matt I dont agree with you on this. I say follow what has been successful, and wel accepted by common net user world over. It is better to try out something that is successful than creating a new thing and wishing it would be well liked.
To e frank,, most of the net /forum users dont look for the features of a forum, to use them. But ifsomething looks them in the eye they would certainly it.
eg if add as friend is visible graphically, it is more likely that it will be clicked. I know this feature is still there.
The feature incorporated by VB is good
@Cool Surfer: vBulletin is FAR from being “successful”, in fact they’re falling like a rock in many people’s eyes, especially mine. I’ll bet you that they’ll soon fall to IPB as UBB fell to them.
Hear – hear on this one. I am much against adding features just for the competetion. Instead, have the nerve to throw away clutter and improve basic user experience. Less is more, when it comes to user interface.
I agree with cafeine here. So many sites consist of articles AND forum, and integration of these parts is crucial. I don’t think I’m the only one cracking my skull to find a way to integrate my forum user base with my CMS.
If you could come up with something that allowed you to state “Easy integration with any CMS”, that would be a killing feature
Matt, I think each type of web 2.0 medium – forums, social networking sites, blogs, wikis, etc has its own particular emphasis and slant. There’s room for them all. I agree, though, that there’s little point in trying to put all the functionality in one place. This might appeal to those with the ‘land-grab’ mentality of c.1999, when it was thought you could sort of monopolise the Internet if you got your site right, but it doesn’t work.
On a technical note, though, surely it is possible to syndicate content across sites – Friendfeed does this by automatically linking to my blog entries and Twitter tweets (when I get round to doing any) to Facebook.
I love forums, though, and have been an avid user of a couple of motorcycling ones since 2000. VBulletin-based, as it happens. Let’s hope they don’t mess them up
Hi Matt,
I’m right there with Cafeine. I currently run a Joomla content site that tries to imbricate with IPB, but it’s just a pain in the posterior. I want to use the forums as comment systems on the articles, and I want to be able to mark a forum post as an article. That would turbocharge the site and the forums by making it exponentially easier to highlight article-quality content – and turning in into user engagement hooks.
If I had to drop Joomla to do it (and switch to IP.Nexus CM, say
), I’d even consider it.
In other words: I also agree with Simon and you that some fashionable features go against the grain. But each site is different, and laying a good groundwork for content integration would go a long way to increasing IPB value.
Best regards and keep up the good work (which does not mean I don’t have any beefs with my 75k member IPB forum),
Miguel
Matt,
Big ass & badly written mail sent. Hope you’ll find it interesting.
They all have their place – if your site’s membership is large enough then social-networking ’sub-clubs’ are definitely useful. Most forum sites don’t fit that bill, but there’s plenty of forums with 50k+ members that could make good use of social-networking features. There isn’t all that much left to do with forum base code – write it to MVC standards (using zend framework preferrably – vb4 is moving there), move to table-less design (phpbb3 and gossamer forum has done that), paid-memberships (done) and add plug-in support (done by a couple for a while now). Add that easy interface for CMS’s and something like Magento and what else is left? IPB4 will be years away with no real goals to shoot for.
The difference between facebook/myspace and some of the largest forums isn’t all that much.
“IPB4 will be years away with no real goals to shoot for.”
Why worry about IPB4? The new framework is very extensible and until PHP 6 comes along I don’t see the need for a rewrite.
IPB4 is years away – but so what? If you’re talking about in comparison to vB; then who cares? vB are mostly catching up with vB 4 in terms of PHP 5 / MySQL 5, etc. and we’re already there.
I wouldn’t use the zend framework either for a forum system. It’s too fiddly, relies on too many file includes and is too large and generic to be any real use. Forum systems get a measly resource footprint to work with so you have to be as efficient as you can be.
I agree with what you say about the “social” movement and forums, except one small thing.
Innovate whenever possible. Use new technologies and new ideas to help innovate. (I know you guys do, but you’re not talking as IPB developer.)
For instance: “I enjoy nothing more than inventing hilarious status updates and uploading photos to my Facebook profile knowing that everyone I’m “networked” with can see them and reply to them.”
Okay, so try to incorporate something like OpenID and OpenAuth that also have image sharing options (perhaps Google’s social?). Whenever images are shared via their blog or other logged in accounts, if they’re using OpenID (and registered it with the forum), it’ll update on their profile pages. Automatic interaction, and social reaction…and you don’t have to sully yourself (necessarily) with Facebook.
Just a random thought and/or possibility.
I prefer to use a forum for communication, not for sharing baby pictures, but whatever floats your boat!
…or, at the very least, have a social sub-section of your own website to allow plugin developers to submit their own creations in a digg-style, community oriented voting system (thumbs up – good idea, it works, not buggy, etc…; or thumbs down) with possible feedback. It’s an easy way to advertise ways to extend a forum (without sullying your own code) without causing users to use a search engine, and it adds a community aspect – plus it makes it easier to filter the good plugins from the bad since the community would do the work for you.
Again: talking in general here, not necessarily about IPB.
Yes Matt but I don’t have the same opinion with you on that. I speak follow what has been successful and well accepted by common net. It is better to try out something that is successful than creating a new thing and wishing it would be well liked. Most of the forum users don’t look for the features of a forum e.g. if add as friend is able to be seen graphically, it is more likely that it will be clicked. I know this feature is still there.
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