For me i feel Topics is really not necessary as it takes time to figure out the appropriate topic title, and now a days you can’t see it often on other platform so the user is programed to just type what ever comes to his mind without the need to think of a topic which is also can help in increasing the community activities.
I have question that i’ve been asking my self lately Is it possible to remove topics and display the the post instead similar to a social network layout. in case of a long thread a "read more" can be used.
I don’t understand how would you create a post without having a topic first in a typical forum arrangement. Discourse is a forum software not a social media service. If you’re looking at a social media platform, try some other open source solution e.g. mastodon
Thank you, Its true discourse is a forum platform but its the most flexible platform i’ve ever seen and i don’t see why it can’t be customized for more social network look.
I’ve tried mastodon yesterday and I can’t compared to discourse in terms of features and functioning, however, thanks for the suggestion.
Titles are crucial to a topic. I don’t see a reason those should be hidden or removed. If your community members can’t write reasonable title, they need to get a lesson on two about how to use a forum. If you want to get more fancy, you can invest time in building a plugin which sends a random title for a topic and then hides the title area through CSS … but that will make your entire site very, very very weird with all the hidden titles.
If you just fancy the social media look, try the fakeboook theme
Lol, I’ll defiantly consider a customized theme for this, part of securing success to your community is to understand and coop with the market, in the Arab region forums are almost dead platforms it will be extremely difficult to trying enforce typical forum layouts for the audience. of course it will be way easier to customize discourse for that goal instead of creating a new system from the beginning plus discourse is full of great features not to mention the great mobile experience that comes out of the box.
looking at your profile I understand you do some customization for discourse … from your perspective is this something doable?
thanks for the insight, i totally agree with discourse purpose, however, i can’t see why an open source platform can’t be adjusted the way we want it to be.
First you need to define what you want. In detail.
But the question shouldn’t really be ‘can it be done?’’, because Discourse is a codebase and the plugin architecture allows you to override (almost) everything.
The question is more like: is the effort/cost to you worth the benefit to you.
If you build a community of value, people will take the time to create topic names. I look at it as quality over quantity… but it depends on the community too.
I think you need to decide what kind of engagement and community you want to build then pick a platform based on that.
Whatever you build it needs to offer something that social media and the other forums do not.
There’s tons of reasons why various forums have died, very seldom are they platform related. Don’t read too much into the demise of the other forums beyond understanding that whatever you build needs to have a reason to exist.
