Forum Replies Created
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What we’re suggesting Dailytalker mate, is that just because you have Facebook Connect does not mean that people will want to leave Facebook to join your forum.
People on the internet go where other people are. Aol > MSN > MySpace > Facebook. Yahoo > Hotmail > Gmail. wtc.
For people that use Facebook, and facebook connect, there is the belief that not having it is somehow stopping people from using your forums. The thing is, we have no way of knowing how correct that is, we have no stats.
What we do have is stats for people that did implement Facebook Connect on their websites, and those stats tell us that people who want to join in the discussion will do so regardless of FBconnect or not.
The largest success story of FBconnect has been the HufingtonPost, which has seen a spike in the number of people using FBconnect to use its website. Thats a positive for FBconnect for sure, but when you look at their stats they get 1 new person signing up via FBconnect for every 3000 people (*this is the published average) that see their “news story” on someone’s Facebook page/link. Almost all (over 95%) of people that use FBconnect on their site come directly from Facebook itself.
There is no data to suggest that FBconnect helps people sign-up or join-in discussions on websites. Infact, there’s alot of data to suggest that people will only use FBconnect if they come directly from facebook to your forum post, and that in the best case scenario, you’ll get 1 sign-up for every 3000 people that see what you’ve written on facebook.
I dont know about you, but nothing i write on Facebook gets seen by more than 100,000 people (for a charity news), which would result in 33 new people on that charities forums. Thats not worth the development time, nor the hassle of constantly updating.
As always, good talking to you
Merry Christmas
Thanks for the info Dailytalker, always great to hear real world examples.
The issues i have is that almost all of features which your users could use are availible for BBpress as a plugin. TinyMCE, Quotes, report users/posts, are all availible as plugins. Changing login requirements and temporary bans are also availible as a plugin.
Private messaging (and there is a plugin) is a funny one because some people love it, most think its useless when there’s such a thing as e-mail. Not to mention it just leads to added spam.
“high security level no spam” is something i doubt, because so far, no-one has been able to elimate spam. Google/microsoft/apple – you name it – they get spam. Its more than likely that your particular board got no to little spam, and it was picked up.
For me, these 2 stand out:
you could move posts from one topic to another in a very easy and very nice way
sophisticated admin-section
These are the issues i face with BBpress everyday. I know that different people will be faced with different problems, but when we simply can’t fully administer BBpress, surely its the feature that has to come first.
If you dont mind me saying also DailyTalker, your old forum looks far more like a forum than your new BBpress one (which looks very plain and boring). I’d definately suggest creating a theme to make your two forums look the same. This will make life easier for the users
Thanks for the discussion, and have a merry christmas.
Sir,
We don’t agree on these things, but its very cool we can discuss them openly, and in a manner such as this. My hats off to ya’.
On my site I offer Twitter and FB login via IntenseDebate and get people to use them all the time for commenting.
That’s awesome. Could you garnish us with some figures please mate, because the other figures and stats that i could find (Alexa etc.) all point to a poor take up of FBconnect, and a very low “new user” clickthrough – unless replying to a post from facebook (have to get that caveat in there because those stas look good).
Number of Users?
Number of Users who used to signing normally and now use FBconnect?
Number of Users who have never signed in normally but have only used FBconnect?
That would be really useful to us all i think, to put it in context.
You may call it the flavor of the week, but Facebook has more than 350 million active users.
It doesn’t, it has over 200million unique accounts, but it doesn’t have even 200million unique people (i personally run 17 FB accounts between myself, my company, and the charities i help out).
Dont get me wrong, the site is both huge and popular, but its not gotten the number of people that some folks claim. Heck according to Facebook’s Mark Z in February, when it overtook MySpace as the #1 social networking site in the US (again – in the US), that half of its userbase logs in once a day, and 80% of its userbase logs in at least once a month. Now in the month that it overtook MySpace, Alexa claims for 350million page views, its imply cant have 350million people. But that slightly off-topic, so lets bring it back.
If number of possible users is the main positive for FacebookConnect then it fails, as it actually comes 4th. So does that mean we should build FBconnect after writing the other 3 into the core? Or are we going with FBconnect because you use it…
- GoogleFreindFinder (or whatever its new branding is: apparently GoogleSingleSignon) has access to everyone with a (specific type of) gmail account and everyone on Okurt – it covers a ridiculous number of people (worldwide).
- MSN passport has access to everyone with an MSN or Yahoo email address for single signin.
- MySpace uses OpenID so OpenID has access to the third most users.
- Facebook comes in fourth (and there’s a big big gap betwen 3rd and 4th)
Also, its not so much that Facebook is the “flavour of the month”, its just that we’ve seen this all before. The dominant website in its field, looks like no-one will ever topple it and BAM, yesterdays news. The long you spent developing for the internet (this is my 15th paid year), the more you see the simple fact that content is what engages people, regardless of systems or context.
The reason we’re so adamant about this subject is not because we’re being stubborn, its because we’ve had this conversation before. We had it with AoL, we had it when Microsfot rolled out MyPasspost/Hailstorm, we had it when Microsfot rolled out Live, we had it with OpenID, we had it with myspace, We had it with GoogleSingleSignon. I, and in deed we, are not knocking Favebook or FBconnect – its just that its software owned and maintained by a company outwith BBpress, and sooner or later they are going to dip in popularity or make such a large change to the API that the standard BBpress will fail with no notice.
We know this, becuse they already did it 3 times this year
Imagine (as a user…please separate yourself from the admin process) visiting a forum and knowing you can immediately log in and join the discussion with your FB account.
1) You’re going to need a facebook account. There are not as many people with FB accounts as i think you think there are. Not to mention, Non-white, Non-North-America, Non-College-Educated, Non-Under-25s, Non-broadband-users are FAR FAR FAR less likely to have one (80% of FB users tick all those boxes).
2) If you are so engrossed/captivated/moved by the content of a forum post that you feel the need to add to the conversation, is registering really a deterant? As a user, if i really want to comment/reply/converse, i usually see what the registration process is like. I know from my phpBB forums, the drop off after the registration page is loaded is HUGE, and the drop off after a failed registration is over90%. I suggest you check your stats too. Alot more poeple go to registration pages than its presumed, but the registering process is where it ends.
3) Surely, if registration is the problem, our time is better suited on making that easier for the user.
4) Purely from an end user perspective (and not an admin), i dont want to use FBconnect, i can just use anonymous posting and thats the even easier option! FBconnect is a half way house for you as both a user and an admin, but it requires a massive amount of work for the BBpress team – again for a feature that not common, not worldwide, nor often-used.
Matt’s made a comments re: bbPress and forums a while back along the lines that forums really haven’t changed that much in the past ten years. Exactly. Allow stuff like FB connect to encourage conversations and bring them into the next century!
Surely good conversation and topics encourage conversations and not FBconnect. I doubt many people find a forum very boring, but feel compelled to join in just because the website lets them log in via FBconnect.
You know, when somethings been the same for a long time (is basic, usable without too much instruction, and does exaclty what it says on the tin) there usually isn’t a whole lot you can do to make it better; and on the rare occasion when there is… its usually come form a total overhaul and not adding to the original.
I say that because much smarter people than you and I have been using Forums for a greater number of years that either of us, and no-one has yet came up with a better format. There’s an inate desire in humans to make things better, but that does not mean that something can always be improved greatly simply because its worked the same way for a great amount of time.
Also, single signons became availible last century, heck last millenium, and they didn’t take off in the last 10 years because people didn’t want or like them; so somehow integrating FBconnect isn’t going to magically make forums current or “this century”.
I do not understand the opposition to making FB’s core more robust feature wise.
What is the harm in including additional features
We’ve had 1 developer (working close to part-time) on BBpress for 2 years.
We’ve had NO developer working on BBpress since July 15th.
The two main plugin suppliers have left the project.
The wiki / developer documentation is now a loans/spam/porn website
So, who are these magical little elves that are going to build and then maintain all these features??
It kind of reminds me of the Gnomes in South Park http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park).
1. Features
2. ???
3. Kill vBulletin
It seems like step 2, the bit where the work actually comes in, is just presumed to happen magically. Which is the only way it would happen, given that right now our development team consists of… no-one.
Adding more features to the core standardizes those features so they do not break in future builds
Adding thigns to the core doesn’t automatically stabalise them, a developer stablises them.
Again, that developer is currently… no-one.
Thats the issue BBpress has had for the last year. Sam added loads of things to the core, changed loads of functions, hardcoded alot of template functions into the core, and has now gone without telling anyone until months after (N.B. This was Sam’s pain emplyment, and is not a criticism of the man himself – merely a statement of the facts).
These things dont stabalize themselves, they need development, and adding them to the core does not guarentee that, all it does is guarenteee that time is taken away form other things.
allows even better plugins to be unveiled to customize them further.
BBpress 1.0.2 has bee a stable RC release for over 6 months now. Where are all these plug-ins? Where are all the plugin developers rushing to add functionality? Where are all the massively different customisations? *tumbleweed*
Let’s help bbPress evolve and become more robust featurewise so it buries vBulletin
Robust is the polar opposite of harcoding reliance on an extrnal and ever-changing API into core.
And mate, we’re not here to bury vBulletin, thats not the goal; we’re here to make forum software in accordance with the Philosphy and Features on the about page. IF you’re ever wondering if something fits into BBpress, always check https://bbpress.org/about/ and see if it fits into those 5 design philosophies. If it doesn’t, chances are, it wont be going into BBpress.
Take care, and good health.
Kev
Wow, for some reason half of my post doesnt’ appear until i’m logged in. That can’t be good…
@grassrootsspa
Bloat of the code isn’t the Physical Size mate, its how well written the code is, how processor intensive it is, and how many Database queries it needs etc etc.
v1.0.2 with 0 plugins is about 150% more processor intensive than v0.9 with all my plugins running. On small sites it makes very little difference, on large sites it makes a heck of a difference.
The two websites i’ve upgraded to v1.0.2, simply did to having to upgrade WP on them, are far more processor intensive than all my other sites. Faaaar more. _CK_ had some really good stats on this before she left, which we now dont have access to, so i apologise for my annacdotal evidence.
My point was, not to nit-pick over your statement or get into a discussion about which specific features YOU and I want in the core (because that would vary from everyone else here), but merely to come to some form of concensus about how we should talk about what we all think BBpress needs.
I say this because, since BBprogress closed and i’ve tried to be more involved with the BBpress site again, i notice that people mix up Feature requests quite a bit. If i can again take your post:
“…private messaging, TinyMCE/rich text, topic views, Allow Images, Smilies, User Directory, Members Online, Related Topics, Reputation, Top Posters…”
Topic Views is a great example of something that is pretty bog standard in terms of user’s experience of forum software. X thread was viewed Y times and replied to Z times. Without adding much/any bloat to the forum software, you’re adding a feature any user from ages 1 to 100 could use without requiring interactivity.
Private messaging, Reputations, Rich Text Editors etc all work on the presumption that the average/most users want that. Experience tells us otherwise.
“Let’s make bbPress more robust in features so it blows vBulletin out of the water”.
I’m not sure why anyone else came to BBpress, so i dont want to presume. But there seems to be 2 camps, those that wanted totally customizable well written code with hooks in a way we were used to and those that came to BBpress because WP is awesome and easy to configure/download themes for and they wanted to create something as good as vBulletin but easier to control.
I’m quietly confident people in camp 1 are not fussed in the slightest about blowing “vBulletin out of the water”, because if it did, then i’d just have something along the same lines as vBulletin. Not wanting that is the reason i joine dup here in the first place, again thats just me.
People in camp 2, have a tendancy to want core Features to be things (while useful) that aren’t neccessary for forum software to fulfill its duty in the most efficient manner.
There’s nothing wrong with either opinion, but taking the fight to other forum software via cool features that on the whole are rarely used by the end user, is not in anyway the focus of BBpress.
It is good to see an old voice
You’re ofc right about fixing this website (in the first instance to remove all the wrong information), and the plugin section, but i’m going to say that documentation on functions is not something i’m too fussed about right now.
I think you’re right that, even with Matt taking over BBpress, we wont have a new release anytime soon, and as such this is BBpress’ most stable time in years to design theme’s and plugins. And yet, thats not happening.
With Sam’s moving on, and then then _ck_’s moving on, the project appeared (emphasis on appeared) to be shelved or forgotten about. Development has slowed to a crawl, and many sites that use BBpress are still choosing to use 0.9 (I know that both you and I are for the most part).
The realism is that 1.0.2 wasn’t seen to be a full on stable release by many, rather a rushed stop gap. This wasn’t helped at the time by _ck_’s negative comments about it (which i agreed with both at the time and now). It was largely rewritten between the 2nd and 3rd alpha, and beta testing was scrapped before it was released to us. 2 small bug fix released 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 and c.15 days later the main/only developer leaves town without saying anything. *tumbleweed*
Whatever Matt and the team do, it’ll need some serious project management, and some serious PR to get people beliving in the project again. Looks to me like he’s started both, which is wonderful, but i still doubt that many people will be up for documenting a version of BBpress that is likely to be replaced realtively soon – especially given how few plugin or theme developers there are for BBpress, and the sheer drop in numbers in comparison to how many there were a year ago.
Good night all and take care.
It is, by about 50%.
That said, no version of BBpress is particularly heavy on the processor
