Comments on: Social Networking And Forums

By: frank

frank — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:14:29 +0000

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.

By: Brendon Kozlowski

Brendon Kozlowski — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:23:55 +0000

…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.

By: Brendon Kozlowski

Brendon Kozlowski — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:20:33 +0000

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!

By: Matt Mecham

Matt Mecham — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:15:56 +0000

“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.

By: Allen

Allen — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:52:44 +0000

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.

By: Cafeine

Cafeine — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 03:11:06 +0000

Matt,

Big ass & badly written mail sent. Hope you’ll find it interesting.

By: Miguel

Miguel — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 12:01:01 +0000

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

By: Simon Carswell

Simon Carswell — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:35:08 +0000

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

By: Morten Z

Morten Z — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:22:30 +0000

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

By: Forum communities vs social software « eme ká eme

Forum communities vs social software « eme ká eme — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:31:39 +0000

[...] looking for a software fix, I landed on Matt Mecham’s blog and his unscripted rant about the difference between forums and social networks. Which, unsurprisingly, I mostly agree with. BTW, Mr Mecham’s the lead developer of my [...]