Joel on Community Forums

Evil Grinn writes "In Building Communities with Software, Joel Spolsky starts with a lament about the lack of real-life community among programmers, but rapidly seques into an explanation of why he thinks his own forum system is better than Usenet or Slashdot. I really don't participate in Joel's forums enough to comment, but they are pretty basic. No registration system. No branching (you can only add comments to the end of a conversation, not reply to comments in the middle). No mod points. Quoting in replies is strongly discouraged. All of these are part of the design of the system, not missing features."

Comments

Voting with our feet

[MaxwellStreet]

Slashdot isn't perfect - but it's gotten wide recognition for being a news outlet for the technically minded.

Tens of thousands of users... active discussions daily.

Joel may not think this format is ideal, but nothing succeeds like success - and Slashdot is successful as a discussion format.

My pet peeve

[Otter]

OK, here's the deal-breaker for me with forums:

Forcing the reader to click to read every new comment.

See ZDNet Talkbacks for an example. I'm sorry, if I wanted to invest that much effort I'd be doing work instead of screwing around online. That mentality of maximizing page loads should be left to fan reviews on teenage overclocker sites, where it belongs.

See dot.kde.org for a good example. Like most Squishdot sites, it used to collapse threads on any story with more than some small number of posts (ie, anything interesting). When Navindra made it possible to change that threshold (due, in part, to my whining about it ;-) ) participation skyrocketed.

Question:

[ivan256]

All of these are part of the design of the system, not missing features.

When did these become mutually exclusive? Just beacuse something is intentionally left out doesn't mean it's not missing. Wether the features being missing is a good thing or not is the only thing that can be up for discussion.

Whatever

[jvmatthe]

A conversation is made better by minimizing quoting? I disagree; a discussion can be made more precise with quoting. I also feel it can eliminate flamousness, because you give context to comments that might otherwise be misconstrued. This isn't to say that quoting doesn't encourage skilled trolls to take posts out of context to make a warped point.

Branching distracts? Quite the opposite; the very structure of USENET threading and threading on Slashdot allows me to ignore irrelevant branches very easily.

Previewing posts isn't good? Sorry, but previews are good for at least two uses in my experience. I get to see my post and reconsider the structure of what I have to say. Also, it allows me to reconsider if I'm about to flame the hell out of someone, or more often remove language that could be misconstrued because of poor word choice.

I really feel that Joel has an idea of how he can force non-technical users to deal with online forums. And that may be fine for his purposes if he has a lot of non-technical users. But forcing users to jump through these hoops does not encourage them to become more proficient users of what I see as more sophisticated, forums. And, in the sense of organizing information, I find the kind of forum he's pushing to be amazingly inefficient, since the idea of a thread of a discussion can be completely destroyed (without draconian topic splitting by moderators).

Honestly, though, it's as if he took every design decision that's part of current forums and decided to provide a contrary view, for the sake of argument. While I think it's great to discuss those structures that we take for granted that might be improved, this seems intentionally controversial without any suggestions for better organizing information.

Ah well. I disagree with his idea of a productive forum, but then I'm a long time USENET user. (This post previewed several times to elaborate on my original two paragraph post. Oh, and I corrected some ambiguous language. And, believe it or not, I kept the original story in another browser tab so I could refer to it, although I didn't quote from it.)

No Posting Policies?

[AllMightyPaul]

The thing I *really* don't like Joel's system is his policy of not showing the policies. There is an incredibly obvious and rather fatal flaw that is inherent in this.

Say some jerk comes to the message board and starts doing mean things like trolling. So you punish him or her appropriately. However, then one of your established users begins to start trolling, so you go lightly on him or her, because he or she is respected and had a bad day. Well, that's not good. Inconsistency in punishments is something that drives people away. In the business world if you treate one person differently than another, you have lawsuits on your hands!

So who is to know what is allowed and what isn't when the rules don't exist? I think that this is the actual reason for Joel not wanting to post rules. This way he can punish whomever he wants and selectively decide to enforce the rules.

This coupled with his policy of deleting "off-topic" and other things that he "doesn't like" leads to a really bad "community" with something akin to secret police patrolling the message board, silently taking out those who don't conform and whatnot. How bad.