Moot.it: Forums and commenting re-imagined | Hacker News Reader

Moot.it: Forums and commenting re-imagined

moot.it

28 pointstipiirai57 comments

The design reminded me of Vanilla forums [1]. Its very much like their default theme [2]. I see some features from Stack Exchange. + sign reminds me of Google+.

Its real time, I get it. I get notifications of who signed in and signed out, nice. this is may be new for forums software. but reminds me of chat rooms.

To me it is few things collected together, other than that I didn't get what exactly got re-imagined. is it just the easy integration ? Could you please elaborate ? or just a simple list will do. or am I missing something explained already ? in that case a link will suffice.

Is there a dashboard where admins can check statistics [and that kind of things] ? How does it look like ?

Also, just as a note, I didn't register on demo forums only because I couldn't use Google/Twitter account.

[1] http://vanillaforums.org/ [2] http://www.forum-software.org/demo/vanilla

I listed a few points on this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726735

The closest competitors for us are (or how we see this) are

- discuss (for commenting) - google groups (for forums)

And we think the biggest advantage is indeed on the integration. Moot sits so nicely to any website and it can be further tweaked.

I don't think this will make a good general forum. The comment box is small. It doesn't look like it would promote lengthy responses with images / video and whatever else.

For me the main problem with forums like phpBB is noise from signatures / profiles / layouts etc and noise from nonsense responses. Often the best response will be buried in page 2 or 3. 5 people will be having conversations back and forth and everything gets mixed up.

I think the closest thing to a good forum for me is stackoverflow. Where the best responses float to the top. Similarly reddit handles separate conversations really well with the way it nests responses.

That isn't to say Moot doesn't have its merits. For providing support this looks pretty handy. Its zippy and the small comment boxes promote quick and to the point responses. For a general content based forum though this currently looks inadequate. I could also see this being useful as a message board for a development team. That kind of utility.

Well there should be nothing stopping you from writing lengthy, thoughtful posts – there is no 160 character limit, (in fact, there's no limit). There are line breaks, paragraph breaks, syntax highlight, black and white (vectorized) unintrusive smileys... And the text box does expand while you type (unlike the one I'm typing into now) and shows you a preview underneath it. Images/video are kind of separate from discussion and tend to draw all attention (you already mentioned signature/etc), but if it's what you need, then this is not the solution for now.

The comment box expands as you type.

I’m creating a new forum CMS in Django for fun basically, if anyone wants to kick the tires of it and try something newer than the usual CMSes: http://pygm.us/nPrOiHJo. I don’t know which Greek letter you’d use for its progress, but it is not in any way close to a beta. It can be deployed to dotCloud in a handful of steps, though.

Disregard the Travis CI build failure; I think it was just a time-out on their end.

It’s funny, because I don’t really think it’s imperative to reimagine forums; they are perfectly fine, but it is next to impossible to build a business model around them, which leaves us with some very unsatisfactory and ancient CMSes to use.

I see so many awful CMSes, and it bothers me that we don’t have anything better to use. I’m delighted to see moot.it take a crack at it. I honestly can’t recall anyone else who tried to make an interesting business around forums ... ever? At least outside China.

So regardless of how moot.it looks and works at the moment, they should really be commended for just trying where others have given up without even bothering. As someone who has worked on a forum CMS, I can attest that there are so many small things in forums you need to implement and get right, that you end up with a road map light years long.

What I am saying is that I commend moot.it for just trying. Some of the comments here suggest that there are dozens of great forum CMSes to choose from, which I don’t find to be the case. Better to help them polish the software, because the alternatives are few and often unsatisfactory.

Thanks! You can be sure that we're doing this very seriously and we see a lot of business opportunities but more about that later.. The fact is that we're not afraid to get the Big Load of Many forums.

Perhaps the live demo shouldn't be flowplayer's customer support - when I clicked through to the demo the first thing I saw was a bunch of people complaining and I didn't realise for a while that it had gone to the flowplayer site, and made me think it was people complaining about moot. Just something to consider!

That's just temporary. We rushed out an early build of moot to coincide with the HTML5 Flowplayer release. The full moot release with dedicated moot demos is coming up eminently. I had the same thought as well actually.

Yea. You are so right!

Flowplayer simply offers us a very good platform to make it production ready. It is relatively high traffic.

The concept of internet forums has mostly been gathering dust for the past ten years while the ways people discuss over the internet have changed profoundly, so some re-imagining is definitely in order.

Seems no one has made any real serious attempt to really modernize them.

Stack Exchange?

Stack Exchange is a break for the norm for sure. I guess I don't really consider it since it's not something you can setup on your site to power your own forums and commenting.

Yea. There are definitely something good going on with Stack Exchange but there is lot's of re-thinking on Moot

- forums can be embedded on our site with just a few lines of HTML and it works out of the box

- because it's a true integration with WebSockets and CORS technologies you have complete CSS and JavaScript control

- Moot includes commenting that is as easy to embed as forums

- The real-time aspect on Moot is not just an "cool add on", but the app is completely real time from top to bottom. All operations happen in place and everyone get's notified instantly.

- "My Feed" or "All posts" are simple concepts but you cannot see them elsewhere. Traditional forums are list of links that point to another list of links and you end up clicking and sufring a lot.

Maybe you want to try out search

http://flowplayer.org/forum/#!/search/welcome

To get sense of the speed too.

I'm not sure of what you're imaging but 2 recent new sites somewhat related are:

http://www.branch.com/

http://www.pivory.com/

Yea. We're aware of both of these.

branch is definitely a good one but it's really a different product and market. it's not forums and not really a commenting system for your site also.

and we don't take pivory very seriously

I've seen both of these. Pivory seems not really very mature/serious, and branch doesn't seem like a forum replacement.

IMHO pivory is hideous (different strokes) and still feels too bound by trying to simply make old forums "cool". Seems that commenting and forums line really should be more blurred. I know some people really like pivory but I'm not sure it's really a contendor for a serious forum replacement for a real site. At least in my view.

branch on the other hand is really quite unique. I think however it's more of a commenting platform or something for closed discussions, maybe for some kind of collaborative solution even.. rather than a forum replacement.

Wow, Pivory is clean and well done, no threading though, a shame.

What's good in pivory?

indeed. this particular service looks good, but reimagining is a strong word for what they've done if the screen shots are anything to go by.

Theres a link to a demo on the bottom to play with it.

The link is so hidden I couldn't have discovered it without looking at the bottom (coincidentally).

Not really. You are just looking at the top, progressive layer of the web. There are still tons of niche forums using old software like vBulletin but with lots of traffic. Anything from car enthusiast sites to bodybuilding.

That's true. I think JLehtinen refers to the fact that if you are about to pick a forum software on your site today you still have to choose from these very old systems.

Oh, yeah, I agree. These are very bloated, outdated solutions. But I don't think the site administrators are really interested in doing a full overhaul. Could possibly hurt SEO. Porting over old posts and data would be difficult too.

Yea. Those are valid concerns for sites with existing forums. We're making importers and dump SEO friendly data for crawlers.

How SEO friendly is this? I know that some more popular systems provide a regular dump of static content that you can embed yourself.

This is definitely on the top of our priorities after v1 laungh. Just want the first version out sooner than later and we excluded this feature in purpose.

There are two ways to implement this and we'll study these under flowplayer.org site. And on server it's definitely a static dump every day.

Keeping customers inside the site is a priority for some (vs. pushing some discussions to say zendesk) and this fits in perfectly.

btw, may be make the 'try live demo' link a bit prominent and have a hint about how to close the fullscreen carousel on the homepage? had me confused there for a moment.

We'll do the official release rather soon so we don't put too much efforts on that beta intro page.

Thanks anyway.

I see it took some good ideas from Stackexchange. Good. Since there's no contact email, I'm writing questions here:

1. Is it configurable, to get rid of "likes" and other cluttering elements?

2. I'd like to pay for not tracking my users. Is this possible?

1) Not in v1 but you can simply hide those like and other "clutter" with CSS since the forum is sitting on your site.

2) The data will reside on our servers and it's public. Later we'll have private posts too.

Is this related to the Moot?

Doesn't look like it, but quite a silly name choice for a product around online discussions.

Moot = verb (used with object) to present or introduce (any point, subject, project, etc.) for discussion.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moot

Cannot think of a better domain name.

Just because the definition of the word sort of describes what the product is doesn't mean it's the best domain name. moot is the name of someone that developed an extremely popular site that also facilitates re-imagined forums and commenting.

It surely is re-imagined. For example:

http://boards.4chan.org/c/

Even with 4chan we think moot.it is the best domain name for us and we'll both see how it works.

"Moot" is an Old English word for a meeting, which I believe is still in modern usage. I've heard it used at any rate. So not that bad a name really.

it's also slang for ladybits in some areas. Humorous.

That's funny. I never heard it was used in that way!

Yea. There are other meanings too making the name a bit controversial. Cannot be a bad thing for raising discussion.

See also "Entmoot" from Lord of the Rings.

Not related to Christopher Poole in any ways.

We've been doing this for over two years now but we're getting closer. Should be out this month.

How is it free?

My guess is they are cookie-ing browsers and doing data collection/retargeting.

If they do that, they have to be careful about countries that have data protection / privacy rights, and they might have to be careful about signing up companies/sites hosted in these countries, specifically, the EU

None of that is taking place. SSO and some deeper private discussion options will be available for paid customers. Those options are not relevant for the vast majority of people that would use moot though.

Absolutely not. We will never sell data and we hate ads.

In future we're going to charge for private posts.

the demo has no pagination (infinite scrolling instead--9, permalinks are awkward to find and without javascript you get an empty white page.

Infinite scrolling is actually not going to be there in the final production release.

No, no, no. I refuse to invest any hope in a forum that is not interested in doing properly nested comments. How are your comments systems any better than Disqus or (the superior in appearance and functionality) Livefyre?

Nested comments is something we actually decided not to implement. Look at this HN thread for example. It's very hard to follow and see what are the new ones. Sometimes I search for "minutes" to get entries that are within last hour.

If you want to branch out from a reply that's a new topic. We'll make that easier on later versions but definitely not nested comments.

I am not sure if nested comments are really necessary for a forum either. For example, I see a lot of hacker news threads link to other threads in the same post where a response has been provided (I see one in this post as well).

However, I think user addressability (@xxx) is important in a flat forum.

This is basically what a forum is, though. Commenting services like reddit, HN, and Disqus obviously differ, but they are altogether different than forums.

It's obviously still okay to dislike this structure, but that's what forums (bulletin boards) are basically about.

I think you are seriously wrong about this. Nesting is a feature and many think it's a bad one.

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