General What features do forums lack?

[Bryn]

which was locked because people probably kept bumping it begging to make it happen.

It will happen, right? Jcink can't be behind the times any longer without it...

 

[Cory]

It will happen, right?

Don't give your hopes up. The topic I referred to was created in 2010.

 

[Nomad]

Broadcasting!
You can do anything on forums that you can do on social media, except broadcast content. Since forums lack this feature, and social media sites have this feature, forums are left behind even though forums are older than the social media.

 

[Cedric]

Broadcasting!
You can do anything on forums that you can do on social media, except broadcast content. Since forums lack this feature, and social media sites have this feature, forums are left behind even though forums are older than the social media.

That’s definitely a good point.

 

[Cloaked]

Real time notifications. Invision has this. Instead of an alert bubble at the top of the page that might or might not see there is a notification box that pops up. You can then interact right away.

 

[Daedalus]

I wouldn't mind the live topics feature that vBulletin 3.x and 4.x used a while back where when you have a popular topic, you can see replies in real time. I know that this basically converts the thread into a chatbox of sorts, but it was nice to give the simulated feeling of having real conversations on things.

Broadcasting!
You can do anything on forums that you can do on social media, except broadcast content. Since forums lack this feature, and social media sites have this feature, forums are left behind even though forums are older than the social media.

IC is doing something like this with their new model. They have a video demo of someone giving a presentation with a chatbox to the right and they go in-depth on how you can interact with, moderate, etc, similar to Twitch and some of the other platforms.

 

[Arantor]

I'm not convinced that 'live topics' are actually that interesting. I think they're an interesting tool to have in the toolbox - but they're not a replacement for long form discussion; indeed, trying to have a conversation or discussion in that format is cumbersome (just as it is trying to have much of a conversation of substance on Discord, and for the same reason)

The real question is how discoverable and archivable that content is after the fact. How much it is useful for reference material, looking up things (and then referencing that in conversations)

For me, though, a lot of the things I think that would be really interesting to have are ways to connect topics together. I also wonder if there's interesting space to bring in something like Meilisearch rather than ElasticSearch; so that instead of doing 'similar topics' based on the words matching, something closer to sentiment matching, matching on meaning. (It's not AI, it's certainly not ChatGPT, but some of the underlying ML concepts are relatable)

I think it's also interesting to explore alternative ways of tagging and categorising topics and being able to surface them. What other information about topics do we have (either by default, or that we can optionally start collecting when creating) that would make it useful or interesting to surface? I know we sort of end up doing this by way of prefixes as a first route but I feel there may be others.