

Moot.it: Forums and commenting re-imagined - tipiirai
http://moot.it

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Omie6541
The design reminded me of Vanilla forums [1]. Its very much like their default
theme [2]. I see some features from Stack Exchange. + sign reminds me of
Google+.

Its real time, I get it. I get notifications of who signed in and signed out,
nice. this is may be new for forums software. but reminds me of chat rooms.

To me it is few things collected together, other than that I didn't get what
exactly got re-imagined. is it just the easy integration ? Could you please
elaborate ? or just a simple list will do. or am I missing something explained
already ? in that case a link will suffice.

Is there a dashboard where admins can check statistics [and that kind of
things] ? How does it look like ?

Also, just as a note, I didn't register on demo forums only because I couldn't
use Google/Twitter account.

[1] <http://vanillaforums.org/> [2] <http://www.forum-
software.org/demo/vanilla>

~~~
tipiirai
I listed a few points on this comment:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726735>

The closest competitors for us are (or how we see this) are

\- discuss (for commenting) \- google groups (for forums)

And we think the biggest advantage is indeed on the integration. Moot sits so
nicely to any website and it can be further tweaked.

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bobsy
I don't think this will make a good general forum. The comment box is small.
It doesn't look like it would promote lengthy responses with images / video
and whatever else.

For me the main problem with forums like phpBB is noise from signatures /
profiles / layouts etc and noise from nonsense responses. Often the best
response will be buried in page 2 or 3. 5 people will be having conversations
back and forth and everything gets mixed up.

I think the closest thing to a good forum for me is stackoverflow. Where the
best responses float to the top. Similarly reddit handles separate
conversations really well with the way it nests responses.

That isn't to say Moot doesn't have its merits. For providing support this
looks pretty handy. Its zippy and the small comment boxes promote quick and to
the point responses. For a general content based forum though this currently
looks inadequate. I could also see this being useful as a message board for a
development team. That kind of utility.

~~~
tipiirai
Well there should be nothing stopping you from writing lengthy, thoughtful
posts – there is no 160 character limit, (in fact, there's no limit). There
are line breaks, paragraph breaks, syntax highlight, black and white
(vectorized) unintrusive smileys... And the text box does expand while you
type (unlike the one I'm typing into now) and shows you a preview underneath
it. Images/video are kind of separate from discussion and tend to draw all
attention (you already mentioned signature/etc), but if it's what you need,
then this is not the solution for now.

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pessimism
I’m creating a new forum CMS in Django for fun basically, if anyone wants to
kick the tires of it and try something newer than the usual CMSes:
<http://pygm.us/nPrOiHJo>. I don’t know which Greek letter you’d use for its
progress, but it is not in any way close to a beta. It can be deployed to
dotCloud in a handful of steps, though.

Disregard the Travis CI build failure; I think it was just a time-out on their
end.

It’s funny, because I don’t really think it’s imperative to reimagine forums;
they are perfectly fine, but it is next to impossible to build a business
model around them, which leaves us with some very unsatisfactory and ancient
CMSes to use.

I see so many awful CMSes, and it bothers me that we don’t have anything
better to use. I’m delighted to see moot.it take a crack at it. I honestly
can’t recall anyone else who tried to make an interesting business around
forums ... ever? At least outside China.

So regardless of how moot.it looks and works at the moment, they should really
be commended for just trying where others have given up without even
bothering. As someone who has worked on a forum CMS, I can attest that there
are so many small things in forums you need to implement and get right, that
you end up with a road map light years long.

What I am saying is that I commend moot.it for just trying. Some of the
comments here suggest that there are dozens of great forum CMSes to choose
from, which I don’t find to be the case. Better to help them polish the
software, because the alternatives are few and often unsatisfactory.

~~~
tipiirai
Thanks! You can be sure that we're doing this very seriously and we see a lot
of business opportunities but more about that later.. The fact is that we're
not afraid to get the Big Load of Many forums.

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lewispollard
Perhaps the live demo shouldn't be flowplayer's customer support - when I
clicked through to the demo the first thing I saw was a bunch of people
complaining and I didn't realise for a while that it had gone to the
flowplayer site, and made me think it was people complaining about moot. Just
something to consider!

~~~
tipiirai
Yea. You are so right!

Flowplayer simply offers us a very good platform to make it production ready.
It is relatively high traffic.

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JLehtinen
The concept of internet forums has mostly been gathering dust for the past ten
years while the ways people discuss over the internet have changed profoundly,
so some re-imagining is definitely in order.

~~~
courtneycouch0
Seems no one has made any real serious attempt to really modernize them.

~~~
dorian-graph
I'm not sure of what you're imaging but 2 recent new sites somewhat related
are:

<http://www.branch.com/>

<http://www.pivory.com/>

~~~
drivebyacct2
Wow, Pivory is clean and well done, no threading though, a shame.

~~~
tipiirai
What's good in pivory?

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ericcholis
How SEO friendly is this? I know that some more popular systems provide a
regular dump of static content that you can embed yourself.

~~~
tipiirai
This is definitely on the top of our priorities after v1 laungh. Just want the
first version out sooner than later and we excluded this feature in purpose.

There are two ways to implement this and we'll study these under
flowplayer.org site. And on server it's definitely a static dump every day.

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chandika
Keeping customers inside the site is a priority for some (vs. pushing some
discussions to say zendesk) and this fits in perfectly.

btw, may be make the 'try live demo' link a bit prominent and have a hint
about how to close the fullscreen carousel on the homepage? had me confused
there for a moment.

~~~
tipiirai
We'll do the official release rather soon so we don't put too much efforts on
that beta intro page.

Thanks anyway.

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yyyt
I see it took some good ideas from Stackexchange. Good. Since there's no
contact email, I'm writing questions here:

1\. Is it configurable, to get rid of "likes" and other cluttering elements?

2\. I'd like to pay for not tracking my users. Is this possible?

~~~
tipiirai
1) Not in v1 _but_ you can simply hide those like and other "clutter" with CSS
since the forum is sitting on your site.

2) The data will reside on our servers and it's public. Later we'll have
private posts too.

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tlrobinson
Is this related to _the_ Moot?

~~~
sirclueless
Doesn't look like it, but quite a silly name choice for a product around
online discussions.

~~~
Osmium
"Moot" is an Old English word for a meeting, which I believe is still in
modern usage. I've heard it used at any rate. So not that bad a name really.

~~~
robbiep
it's also slang for ladybits in some areas. Humorous.

~~~
courtneycouch0
That's funny. I never heard it was used in that way!

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tipiirai
We've been doing this for over two years now but we're getting closer. Should
be out this month.

~~~
alexchamberlain
How is it free?

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selectout
My guess is they are cookie-ing browsers and doing data
collection/retargeting.

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rmc
If they do that, they have to be careful about countries that have data
protection / privacy rights, and they might have to be careful about signing
up companies/sites hosted in these countries, specifically, the EU

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aw3c2
the demo has no pagination (infinite scrolling instead--9, permalinks are
awkward to find and without javascript you get an empty white page.

~~~
courtneycouch0
Infinite scrolling is actually not going to be there in the final production
release.

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drivebyacct2
No, no, no. I refuse to invest any hope in a forum that is not interested in
doing properly nested comments. How are your comments systems any better than
Disqus or (the superior in appearance and functionality) Livefyre?

~~~
tipiirai
Nested comments is something we actually decided _not_ to implement. Look at
this HN thread for example. It's very hard to follow and see what are the new
ones. Sometimes I search for "minutes" to get entries that are within last
hour.

If you want to branch out from a reply that's a new topic. We'll make that
easier on later versions but definitely not nested comments.

~~~
lakshmivyas
I am not sure if nested comments are really necessary for a forum either. For
example, I see a lot of hacker news threads link to other threads in the same
post where a response has been provided (I see one in this post as well).

However, I think user addressability (@xxx) is important in a flat forum.

