

Ask HN: A new kind of forum - mds101

As a member of a lot of forums, I have repeatedly observed that nearly all forum software suffers from following issues:<p>1. Poor discoverability of interesting discussion threads.<p>2. Large number of duplicate threads covering the same discussion.<p>3. Linear discussion threads without heirarchy, making it difficult to follow discussions.<p>4. Annoying and detracting user signatures.<p>In order to solve these problems, I propose a new kind of forum wth the following features:<p>1. HN style voting for bringing interesting discussions to the top.<p>2. Stack Overflow style similar topic search to prevent multiple threads for the same topic.<p>3. Heirarchical threaded discussions.<p>4. No user signatures/minimal 1 line text only signatures.<p>5. Hosted service.<p>6. Mobile optimized version.<p>Basically this would be a hosted HN/reddit clone without the link aggregation bit.<p>Does this idea hold merit? Would forum owners/moderators be willing to jump to such a forum?
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ScottWhigham
This is a difficult thing. In 2012/2013, forums are ubiquitous. If you're
going to write a new forum software, you then have to make a choice:

1) Do you only target "people who don't have a forum yet but want to start
one"?

2) Or do you make an upgrade/migration path from vBulletin/etc so that you can
let existing forums move to your software?

If you go with #1, that's a long, long slog IMO. If you go with #2, you have
an instant market of 100,000,000 forums.

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dailygrind
The subject being discussed makes some difference though. A search
functionality in a programming related forum is fundamental, while it probably
isn't in a music one for example.

I've been running a music forum since 2001 (millions of posts) and I'm not
sure an implementation of this type would suit... but these are all good
concepts overall.

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dotborg
Forums are all about community, full of people, who don't care about super-
duper-yet-another-uber-pro-framework.js features

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AznHisoka
exactly. Yup, totally agree. The core people who visit the community could
care less about searching for something.

And the casual visitors don't need to search a ton because they came to a
specific forum thread through a Google search.

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mds101
Yeah, I agree that it's the communit that makes the forum, but I have talked
to quite a few members on different forums serving different niche areas and a
lot of them have agreed that a reddit-esque way of presenting discussions
would be better. Also, it was mostly the people who spent a lot of time on the
forums that usually supported this idea.

Also, shouldn't cleaning up the presentation and making it easy to follow
discussion threads heirarchically increase user engagement?

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shanelja
It sounds like a great idea and I would love to be on your testing team in the
future. My email is on my profile, add me to your beta mailing list :)

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mds101
Thanks. This is still just an idea in my head. I'm just in the 'gauging
interest' phase now. I'll let you know if/when something is available for
testing.

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rolandal
I think a lot would hinge on cost, especially for the larger forums. What is
your idea here to monetize?

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mds101
I was thinking of pricing based on pageviews/month.

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ScottWhigham
As a forum owner, to me "pageviews/month" is a pretty scary metric. "You mean
I'll have to pay more if Google wants to index me?" What about bandwidth/mth?
That seems more palatable to me.

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ig1
1) What's your MVP ?

2) What would your average customer look like ?

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mds101
1\. I haven't given it much thought, but MVP should be a barebones forum much
without any communities, user pages, private messaging etc. basically an MVP
would look like the Ask HN page.

2\. The average customer would be the same as that for any other hosted forum
i.e. someone without the technical chops to run a forum software themselves,
but having the passion to run the community.

~~~
ig1
I think you need to dig down further on the customer question. Are your users
going to be say small community clubs with 20 members using it for chatter, or
fan boards with hundreds of thousands of users, or companies using it
internally.

What does the ROI look like from the user perspective, are your users going to
recoup costs through sell subscriptions to member only forums, run
advertising, or are they going to be funded via patronage ?

