How to simplify the forum? (couple of needs listed)

[Firsh]

@philh

I am curious about what the decision makers use now. Apparently you have been tasked with selecting and implementing a forum system. Perhaps they should trust their initial decision to trust you in the first place.

Nothing, we are starting from scratch. Briefly I tried wpForo within WP but I didn’t like the idea of just 1 server doing all the work.

@simon

It might be worth trying to convince the decision makers that a lot of thought went into Discourse’s design. It’s intended to promote the idea of conversations, as opposed to a one-off comment system where each comment is expected to stand on its own.

I’ve sense that and it’s what I’m aiming for. I’ve been unable to force reverse order and threaded view into the design, but will embrace the flatness.

• They had the most problem with the seemingly-double occurrence of the same post when you open the “replies” using the button. Thats where their idea came from that it was confusing. I got rid of that.

• Also the scroll to on the “this post is a reply to x” was deemed confusing, so I made it non-clickable. We’ll show the users that if they reply to an older post, use the quote feature, that actually embeds that single post within the reply and it’s unambigous that way.

• The first post needed to stand out visually and the reply buttons had to convey to whom they would post a reply to (to the topic in general or to a particular person).

I started with the Graceful theme, and wrote like 500 lines of CSS to tailor it to our needs.

@denvergeeks

As a designer simplifying a cluttered UI is a snap. Just remove and hide stuff until it just has only the features — and nothing more — for the specific use case.

Agree. I even removed the bookmarking feature (as the watching and the browser bookmarks are good enough). And the flagging, as this is like a mastermind group, it’s likely that they will behave and I’ll read everything anyway as a mod, but when we feel like we need it, I’ll bring it back.

@awesomerobot

Consider hiding the reply button in the timeline on the right of the topic content… this is meant to make it easy to “reply to topic” from anywhere in the post, but without knowing the difference between “reply to topic” and “reply to post” it might be added noise.

Yup, the “noise” was the primarly complaint. But I kinda like the reply button to the entire topic being on the OP and at the bottom only. Especially with autoscroll to first unread, it directs users to actually read the conversation.

@awesomerobot

Consider hiding some buttons at the bottom of every topic. There are some redundancies here, like bookmarks, flags, and shares

We don’t even need the shares as it’s private forum anyway. For a brand new unestablished forum, the flagging is also intimidating. We’ll see how unruly this small community is.