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

I disagree with many of his assertions..

[steppin_razor_LA]

But then again, I haven't spent much time at his community.

Slashdot is a very different type of community since there really aren't any persistent "boards" or discussion forums -- the forums are the articles and they last a very short period of time. This is fine -- slashdot is about "news for nerds" after all.

When I spend time at other forums, I want most of the features that were removed. I agree quoting can go too far, but most boards I've been on don't seem to fall prey to to this like email messages easily can.

I like threaded discussions, but not everyone does. I've noticed some systems (i.e. ubb.threads) have some nice technology that allows the user to switch between them.

Overall, this article wasn't too interesting. I'd rather see an article that reviewed a number of the different community systems out there (ahem -- how about looking at my story submission someone???)...

Re:Voting with our feet

[mayoff]

The slashdot forums (which have little merit) are popular because they are attached to the slashdot article feed, which is popular. The article feed is popular because it has some merit and was a first mover. Windows is popular for different reasons.