
Show HN: Tavern, Next Generation Bulletin Boards/Forums (Product Idea) - chaosprophet
http://tavern.asleepysamurai.com
======
nolok
Those slides are horrible, they are too fast for reading and worse, it seems
that manual clicking on the arrows do not reset the timer.

Not sure if I'm particularly slower than others at reading or something, but I
closed the page after 3 "slides" when the site made it abundantly clear that
it didn't want me to read its content.

One note though: you should use mockup pictures for the visuals rather using
screenshots from existing websites, as it is now it sort of give a "Chinese
knockoff" feel.

~~~
chaosprophet
Well, I did not really spend too much time on the visuals, since this was just
to gauge-interest. If I make an MVP, it'll definitely not feel 'knock-offy' :)

EDIT: I've also slowed down the slides by four seconds each. Please do visit
again and check out all the slides.

~~~
nolok
The thing is, I quickly had a very negative opinion of it, and it had nothing
to do with the actual product, only its presentation. With a better slider
system, you would surely get a lot better reactions as people would focus more
on what you are talking about rather that "wait, what, why doesn't it let me
read this".

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dasil003
For the love of god, turn off the auto-slide, it is completely broken and made
me ragequit the browser never to look at your idea again even though I
actually might find it interesting if I could tolerate the presentation.

------
nwh
Based on what I've read (the screenshots are just of reddit and Facebook) this
sounds like it would be a genuinely irritating service to use and be a part
of.

• If there's any place for a 'social' button, it's certainly not a discussion
forum. Typically the content you would be talking about on a forum would be
separated from what you might want to post on Facebook (see pseudonyms).

• People love pseudonyms, there's no escaping that. One of the large
attractions of discussion forums is that you can be pseudo-anonymous if you
are so inclined. If Google Plus failed to convince people to give up their
real information, I can't imagine a forum suite would either.

• Profile photos make page loads long and make the information on the page
less dense. They add absolutely nothing to the conversation, which is why I
presume HN and reddit (large influences in this) don't have them.

• "Flame war control" will just obstruct constructive conversation. Speed and
depth of posting isn't an indicator of malice, and will just make users
discouraged to contribute.

• A hosted service isn't a feature in this case. I can go and read forums that
I was a part of in 2005, but there's no guarantee that a hosted service will
be around next week. If the service disappears, so does the content.

• "Banhammers Galore" isn't a feature, see the current attitude towards
StackOverflow's moderation.

There's headway to be made in bulletin boards, but I feel you've missed the
main issues with the current solutions (vBulletin, phpBB, Vanilla).

------
gizmo
This is really a list of features, not a product. Basically if you execute
well and create great forum software it may become popular, otherwise it
won't. That's pretty much a truism.

------
PavlovsCat
Signatures? One line is still to much for me, all forums need the option to
turn off displaying signatures.

Real names? Hmm. That kills basically all but talking about pets or whatever.
No forums for whistleblowers, abuse victims, with alternate sexuality and/or
religion and the problems arising thereof in certain areas of the world, no
place for really nutty art. It's also trivial to make a fake facebook profile
I'm sure, so in the end it might offer a false sense of security more than any
actual security.

The "flamewar control" stuff.. Yup, definately too nosy to me. Wouldn't know
the difference between flaming and a burst of creativity and all around
merryness, either. Have you ever been member of a really _wild_ forum, I
wonder? Why seek technical solutions to social problems?

And then comes "tagging". Just to increase user engagement, because that's
useful for the site owner, not because it's useful for the users :/

I don't mean to be negative though; built it, it's bound to be useful for
someone, just not me. If anything, it would make for a neat "facebook-like"
forum (facebook, last time I checked, was completely broken for complex
discussions, and the forum apps are ugly and slow). All the complaints I have
about this forum I would also have about facebook, so they shouldn't be a
negative to "that crowd". I'm simply not the target market, but I _am_ a forum
user since I'm a web surfer, and I do care about them a lot, so I have to
ramble.

A next generation forum of _my_ taste would have complete moderator action
transpareny and accountability. How's that for a radical new idea? Or hey, how
about making page views and ad revenue visible to the people providing it?
Maybe allow users to tag and organize content like they want it, with a
bayesian filter suggesting stuff they might like. My next generation forum
would focus _LESS_ on real-time and "current" and "popular", and make all that
just one of many factors. It would be not for ants to pass the time, but for
ants to build weird little palaces over time, with many twisted passages, and
if they so choose, to refactor and straighten out the bits that turn out to be
most useful, to build a library; be it of knowledge, fun, friendship or
anecdotes.

Instead of more tools to use _on_ the users, more tools _for_ the users.

And of course, it can't be hosted; gimme the source or I'm not interested in
the least.

~~~
chaosprophet
> Signatures? One line is still to much for me, all forums need the option to
> turn off displaying signatures.

Ofcourse, there will be an option to completely disable all signatures.

>Real names? Hmm. That kills basically all but talking about pets or whatever.
No forums for whistleblowers, abuse victims, with alternate sexuality and/or
religion and the problems arising thereof in certain areas of the world, no
place for really nutty art. It's also trivial to make a fake facebook profile
I'm sure, so in the end it might offer a false sense of security more than any
actual security.

The real name is not for any notion of 'security'. It's a psychological thing,
to remind users to be civil to each other.

>The "flamewar control" stuff.. Yup, definately too nosy to me. Wouldn't know
the difference between flaming and a burst of creativity and all around
merryness, either. Have you ever been member of a really wild forum, I wonder?
Why seek technical solutions to social problems?

Believe it or not this actually exists on our very own HN (and discussions
here do get 'wild' once in a while). And if it works for HN I don't see why it
shouldn't work in other places.

>And then comes "tagging". Just to increase user engagement, because that's
useful for the site owner, not because it's useful for the users :/

Actually, this would be very useful to users in conjunction with
notifications. There have been many times when I have posted on a particular
thread and then forgotten all about it, and so I miss it when somebody
responds to me. This has happened annoyingly often.

>And of course, it can't be hosted; gimme the source or I'm not interested in
the least.

Why (just curious)? A hosted version is to make it easy for your regular Joe
Forum-master. I suspect not many of them would want to learn to manage a VPS.

~~~
yaddayadda
> Signatures?

Glad to hear there will be an option to turn off, but it wasn't in your
slidedeck so it wasn't an "Ofcourse" [sic] when @PavlovsCat made his comment.

> Real names

@PavlovsCat highlights several areas where user 'security' trumps
psychological civility reminders. Personally, I won't use systems that require
real names for this reason alone. If someone wants to use their real name,
good for them. But systems that require it aren't for me.

> "flameware control"

Sounds like some other systems I know that get in the way of actual
conversation (e.g., I'm trying to respond to individual posts individually,
and manage to do so too quickly). If the controls aren't too aggressive, I can
see the benefit, but if they're too aggressive I feel like I'm being punished
for being able to touch type, and subsequently avoid those forums. (I haven't
hit any such limits in HN, so if they're here, they're a good gauge for not
too aggressive.)

> "tagging"

I happen to be a big fan of tagging. Although some systems do limit to
existing tags, which I'm not a big fan of.

> hosted versus source

As an end user, I use both. When I'm setting up a system, open always gets
preference over closed. There are several packages that have hosted service as
their primary offering, but if you read through their FAQs they still have
their source opened on bitbucket, github, or an accessible self-hosted system.
Such dual-offerings provide the ease of hosted, with the myriad of benefits
that come from open sourcing the code.

~~~
PavlovsCat
I understood "tagging" more in a sense of "tag, you're it". Like some bloggers
do, "I got tagged by Person A to answer these questions", I'm pretty sure I've
seen that before. Maybe I got it wrong, but I thought was like what you just
did, @mentions :P

As for tagging with words (and maybe even more than just one taxonomy), of
course, it's the best. Tag first, tag lots, and find uses for the tags later I
say :D

~~~
yaddayadda
When I viewed the slide presentation, I only noticed the @mention type of
tagging. But I had had a hard time going through the slides, and since your
starting comment seemed more in line with the folksonomic type of tagging, I
was kind of hoping I had just missed that in the hurried presentation.

In this day and age, I haven't seen any reasons not to support the @mention
type of tagging.

The folksonomic type of tagging can absolutely be overdone or restricted into
absolute uselessness. But when done properly, they can be extremely useful.

------
crb3
One obervation: if you're really that adamant about Real Names, you're going
to be regarded as just another privacy reaper. I suggest you implement some
form of locally-registered aliases if your concern is accountability, because
there are entirely too many real reasons for limiting exposure surface on the
Internet. Of course, if it _is_ all about the tracking...

~~~
chaosprophet
Yes, maybe a system of display names would work for this. But the thing is you
have an entirely different mindset when you are responding to 'shadowfaxx12'
rather than 'Martin Carpenter'. It's more to remind people that there is
another real human being behind that particular comment, and to be civil to
them.

~~~
krapp
_But the thing is you have an entirely different mindset when you are
responding to 'shadowfaxx12' rather than 'Martin Carpenter'_

I don't think this is necessarily true. People may be quite willing to be
uncivil to "Martin Carpenter" as well... after all that's one of the points of
'doxxing' someone on a forum, to humiliate them with their real identity, and
troll their real-life friends and family.

Plus, how are you going to tell whether "KRapp" is my real name, a derivation
of my real name or my account name is just a pseudonym that corresponds with
_a_ real name? You could guess it from my email or my facebook account. In my
case (and probably most cases) it's quite easy, but if you're serious about
using real names, I think you're still adding some minimal effort on your part
to have to validate them.

Maybe my real email is "somethingotherthanmyname@gmail" and my real name just
happens to be "Jango Fett." How 'real' does a name have to appear? Google's
already running into problems trying to enforce this, and they already _have_
all the data, because 'real names' don't necessarily map as logically as
people assume.

------
Geee
Ok, it seems that this is just to measure the interest, as such product
doesn't exist at all yet.

Some comments:

1\. Reddit/HN style threads (sorting function by time and score) are great for
news or current issues, not for topics that are continuous. That's why reposts
and duplicates are actually needed. Old threads on HN and Reddit are forgotten
quickly.

2\. Upvoting mechanism / community moderation requires a sizable community to
provide any value.

3\. Real user names do not provide any value, usually it actually reduces to
quality of discussion. Anonymous/throwaway accounts serve their place.
Community moderation already solves the quality/spam/troll issue to some
extent.

Most of these 'features' should be configurable, as there seems to be no clear
thought of why this configuration would be good for everyone.

------
showsover
At first i was thinking this was a parody, but it seems that the idea is well
... serious.

Popular stuff on top, unpopular stuff at the bottom makes me think of downvote
squads and paid upvoters.

Social logins. What when they go down? See facebook login last week. What
about people that don't want to log in with their social account?

The flamewar control seems that it might hamper legitimate conversations.
Imagine 2 or 3 people discussing something civilised, and each time they post,
they have to wait 5 minuten or more. I know I'd stop talking pretty quickly.

The other points are mostly standard stuff. Notifications, mentions, ..

Perhaps I'm not the target group, which might explain my answer :)

~~~
chaosprophet
> Popular stuff on top, unpopular stuff at the bottom makes me think of
> downvote squads and paid upvoters.

Anti-gaming measures would obviously be part of the system as in HN and
Reddit.

> Social logins. What when they go down? See facebook login last week. What
> about people that don't want to log in with their social account?

Local logins are also an option. However, social logins do indeed provide an
ease of use. Perhaps some sort of backup login system might be used as well?
Like get the emails when people first sign up and if your login provider is
down send a temporary login link to the users email.

>The flamewar control seems that it might hamper legitimate conversations.
Imagine 2 or 3 people discussing something civilised, and each time they post,
they have to wait 5 minuten or more. I know I'd stop talking pretty quickly.

Have you ever been discouraged from a lively discussion on HN? Believe it or
not, this same feature exists on HN, and it works rather well.

------
darkotic
Will it be hosted only or will a leased version be available? Any thoughts
given to design or branding customization?

~~~
chaosprophet
If this does get built, then we could probably allow people to use custom
themes to design their site. As for branding, there will be no TavernBB
branding on any forum. All forums will carry their own branding.

Also, it would be available only as hosted. If there is demand for a self-
hosted version then maybe it'll happen.

~~~
cdawzrd
I don't like this trend. A modern self-hosted forum is badly needed. We've
moved away from the time when any self-hosted web software had to be written
in PHP now that many turnkey web hosts support Ruby and Python (and VPS
hosting is cheaper), but the software hasn't caught up yet.

~~~
chaosprophet
I tend to disagree. A lot of shared hosting providers still support only PHP.
The ratio of providers who support Ruby to those who support PHP is
staggeringly small. So, practically the only way to self-host something _not_
written in PHP is to go for a VPS.

While a VPS is quite cheap these days, the skillset needed to operate a VPS is
quite different from that needed to install vBulletin on a shared host. This
is why I wish to keep this as a fully hosted offering.

~~~
Ao7bei3s
Seriously, running a VPS is not _that_ difficult.

The "ratio of providers supporting Ruby to those who support PHP" is quite
irrelevant: just pick one of the providers who do support Ruby. There are
enough of them.

No, it seems more like you (as the software author) only prefer shared hosting
because that would allow you to retain control and make profit.

Also, from your slides: "security comes standard", "Builtin protection against
CSRF, XSS, SQL Injection and a multitude of other attacks" -- what?! If the
source isn't available, how can one be sure? And do you think the developers
of the existing forum solutions _wanted_ to make the mistakes that lead to
their software being vulnerable?

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Sujan
Are the screenshots used from Reddit, Stackoverflow and Facebook comments or
do the show the actual 'product'?

~~~
chaosprophet
Yes, they are just screenshots from other sites. This post was simply to gauge
interest for such a product. The product as such does not yet exist.

EDIT: I have updated the submission title to reflect that it's just an idea.

~~~
Osmose
Could you please be explicit about this in the thread title and the webpage
itself? This comment is the only thing besides the lack of screenshots of the
product itself that indicates that Tavern doesn't exist yet.

------
afshinmeh
So what's the difference between <http://www.discourse.org/>? I think
discourse implement it clearly, I didn't figure out any difference.

------
flexie
Would be interesting, if built.

You should slow down the speed of the slides, though :-)

~~~
chaosprophet
I've added four more seconds to each slide's display time.

