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General interest mega-boards and forum sustainability (community.nodebb.org)

submitted 4 weeks ago by julian@community.nodebb.org to c/general-discussion@community.nodebb.org

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I'm away from my desk for the next few days and so I'll likely be posting more open ended discussion questions.

Recently I've been thinking more about the decline of forums of yesteryear and how hosting a forum has always been rather niche.

That got me thinking about how one of Reddit's "killer features" was that just anybody could create a subreddit. The same could be said about Facebook groups as well.

You don't get that with forums, only the admin can create categories/forums, and by extension that usually limited the rise of general interest boards, and more towards niche topic-focused boards. It also meant that basically every board had a "general discussion" board or "random" board.

Would there be interest in NodeBB supporting something like this... Basically, the ability for anyone to set up a category and instantly moderate it, and build your own sub community inside a community? Does this ruin the magic of forums?

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[–] jdp23@neuromatch.social 4 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

@julian yes yes yes yes!

Years ago when i first looked at NodeBB, I was thinking about it for a discussion-focused social network (kind of like the old tribe.net, or Facebook/Myspace groups), and this was a key area where forum software in general didn't meet my needs -- and it wasn't obvious how to extend it. So I rolled my own as a prototype and it's stayed as a prototype for a dozen years because trying to do a full-fledged implementation that's maintainable and scalable requires implementing a forum system, decidedly non-trivial.

[–] julian@community.nodebb.org 1 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

jdp23@neuromatch.social well that's for sure... every once in awhile I see a company or org roll their own forums because "how hard could it be"

:smirk: I had that misconception once... A decade ago.

Thanks for the input!

[–] jdp23@neuromatch.social 1 points 4 weeks ago

@julian yeah really. in my defence I knew it was hard to do anything scalable. The prototype was good enough to explore several potential directions but the answer kept being that they could potentially work as customizations/extensions of a an existing (scalable, accessible, secure, highly customizable, very flexible) underlying platform with great moderation support, but that didn't exist yet and wow it was not the kind of thing i could just code up on my own.

I do think that for this to work the support for moderation has to be quite good both at the per-group level and at the site level. Community moderation and per-group moderation, if done well, can help a lot with the scalability. Still, site-wide moderators still have to deal with rogue and abandoned groups, and situations where group-level moderation leaves people at risk).

Of course you actually need site-wide moderation to deal with most of that stuff things if the site admin creates all the categories. And user-created categories/forums/whatever are something that would be really useful in a lot of differnet use cases, so IMHO really worth focusing on!