codinghorror

I've historically liked him because of the "developers, developers, developers" thing, but over the last 5-10 years I think history has proven you right. He's a bad CEO who consistently makes bad decisions.

Another mile-wide grin! :)

Have a read of

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/09/good-subjective-bad-su...

and

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

If you only click one link here, click the second link.

Or use Discourse which offers many of the same benefits without the "rush to see who can post the most upvoted image and win" dynamic, and potential for more substantive discussions!

Bonus, you don't have to write any extra code either. Well unless you want to contribute ...

http://github.com/discourse/discourse

By "we" do you mean "you"? I can't imagine buying $2,000 shoes as a college student. Now that I think about it, I can't imagine buying $2,000 shoes, period.

Not true, the open source version of vanilla does not contain all the features. Certain features are pay only.

I can't repro this.

(The following are all screenshots taken at exactly the point described.)

I am scrolled down on the main page of http://meta.discourse.org viewing topics.

http://i.imgur.com/dr0V0dn.png

I click on the topic "Development on Windows". (My read position was already at the bottom of the topic, so that's where I go. There are no new replies to read.)

http://i.imgur.com/OMcKAW5.png

I then click the back button, and go...

http://i.imgur.com/5e4DpK4.png

back to exactly the position, the very same position by pixel, I was at.

Maybe I don't understand what you are talking about, because I can't reproduce it? Can you share some screenshots?

It is true that when you deep-link into a topic you've already read, with new replies, we take you to the top of the post you had a last read position at. But that seems unavoidable and correct to me. (You could argue we should start you at the post below the last one you read, I guess.)

Perf will not be great to the card though. Depends what you install or store there, or if it even can be installed there. SD cards are fine for general media storage, but anything perf intensive you don't want there.

Excellent, if you need any help from us, ping us on meta.discourse or on GitHub!

Ours is essentially the twitter model, with a few tweaks. I think a hybrid approach -- flat for reading, but limited expansions on demand for context -- is best.

Part of my working hypothesis is that the reason flat forums are so ubiquitous is their simplicity -- I think larger audiences just don't "get" threading at all, and there are a lot of ways for misused (and even correctly used) threading to actively harm the discussion.

We should never lose your place. We try very very hard not to. Experiment on try.discourse.org and see.

notice that one of the flag reasons is "off-topic", to give the poster (if threshold reached) a gentle nudge that hey, maybe they can click "Reply as new Topic" and take it there.

Or mods can click "select posts", click click click the posts they want, then click "move to new topic".

And topics created either way are bidirectionally linked, so you can follow different related tangents back and forth without breaking your flow in the main topic.

So either the community or mods can hopefully assist in keeping things on topic.

Correct, I can talk about it, or I can do something about it. Be the change I want to see, and all that!

A bunch of differences, but the big one is that we're 100% open source. No crippled-unless-you-pay business model here, personally I find those irritating.

Vanilla is certainly much more mature since it's been out longer. Discourse is new as of today, so we've got a long way to go.

It's much more meta, for one thing. SO had a topic: programming. Here we don't have any particular topic, our goal is to make your topic successful, whatever it is, through open source software and community.

In other words Discourse is only successful in the sense that it lets you be successful.

Hard to say since it's so early, but I view theming and skinning support as very, very important in the priority list. It's probably the #1 customization people do on forums! And probably on blogs as well...

Completely, forums are about basic human expression in paragraph form. This is an essential right and we want to give it back to the world in 100% no strings attached open source form.

Not that there aren't other forum choices, of course there are, but VERY few are 100% open source and even fewer are ones I want to use.

We do have a fully documented import and export format, however, we're not prioritizing conversion at this time because we believe there's too much technical and social friction to wholesale forum change.

And it's early, very early in our beta!

Mostly we expect early Discourse adopters to be of the "starting from scratch" kind.

You have to look at the other choices to appreciate part of it. I know, this is a little bit like saying "we are the prettiest object in a room full of ugly objects".. but.. well, see for yourself:

http://www.forumcon.com/

There are very, very few 1st tier forums that are fully open source, too. None that I know of!

Well, we hope that we can popularize Rails to better approach the "it just works on every server everywhere" PHP ubiquity.

And what's, er, worse? PHP everywhere, or Ruby everywhere?

We think you'll be able to suppress elements in the default design that you don't want with a custom theme or skin.

The default design (by Matt Grantham, great work by the way) is only supposed to be "good enough", not so good that you never want to change it.

And I hope FOR THE LOVE OF FSM that we've created a default design better than the bottom of the barrel that is phpBB or vBulletin, otherwise, geez.. ouch.

We require a CLA for code contributions, so we have an underlying license to all the code -- and we can sell it to corporations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement

What is Quora?

We really, really wanted a badging system in at launch but just could not get it done in time. It is a very high priority.

We view badges as alternatives to reading FAQs and community guidelines.

A lot of the moderation stuff and trust metrics isn't visible on the surface. And to be honest, we've only implemented the first two (new user, not-new user) and final (appointed moderator) trust levels at the moment.

One way to think of this is as follows: what happens when posts get flagged? What's the sequence, who knows about it, and how? For that matter, who can flag?

We do have basic rate limits throughout the app, and they're all configurable as well.

Much of this has to evolve. I'd love your input on it, too!

There is a "best of" view in Discourse. It only kicks in when a topic gets to a certain size and we have enough signal to infer the best post.

Thought experiment: how does one quantify the 'best' posts on a discussion topic? Discourse has some ideas about this, and I bet you do too.

It does, but the trust metric we use is not very visible on the surface. Which is sort of by design. There is a hint of it on the user page if you know where to look! :)

Probably the main visible entry point is flagging, so try flagging a post or topic.

It's also hard to see the moderation functions from the outside, but I assure you that they're as frictionless as we could make them! For example, multi-selecting posts, splitting topics, merging topics, locking topics, archiving topics, etc.

There's still a lot to do, we have no way of selecting multiple topics at the moment, for example. But I encourage you to try out the Vagrant image if you want to hack on Discourse quickly. It includes a small db, and you'll be a moderator there.

We made it as minimal as we could, but discussion is kind of a noisy activity by its nature.

That said, we want to have excellent skinning and theming support, and I'd love to see "even more minimal" themes. We ship a reasonable default theme for everyone to use, but it shouldn't be so good that nobody wants to replace it, right?

Great point, and I suspect you are right. Either remote is a deep part of your startup culture from day one, or don't even try.