Can we build better forum software?

[codinghorror]

You clearly haven’t researched this board carefully enough. Your proposal is like pitching a next generation electric car to the Amish.

Someone’s always on rumspringa, though. Those are the ones I am trying to reach.

What I think would need to be in next gen forum software is easy backend updates. It needs to be as foolproof as updating an iPhone.

Absolutely, super-easy updates and awesome defaults (a great OOB experience without plugin-mania) are the goal from day one.

Having a dual interface - a downloadable app and a web-interface option - might be doable, but I’m afraid you’d run into a system that optimized for one at the expense of the other

One of the many, many crazy things about the status quo is that no forum software has a sane mobile web interface out of the box. Of course we aim to fix that in a free and open source way, among many other things…

Some of us would be helped by concrete examples of how the software is not encouraging the social norms in the faq, or things software could do that would improve users following the social norms

Consider basic mechanics like quote replying. How does this forum make it easy for me to quote reply in the editor. Are replies linked to the original posts? Are original posts linked to the replies? Would you even be notified at all if I quoted you? Or mentioned your forum username in passing? How do I tell the background of the person who typed the message, in the global sense and in the “gee, is this thread 5 people talking to 1 guy, or 20 people talking to each other?” And then there’s the pagination disaster, because nobody reads pages 1-5 (or even two pages) before replying. Perhaps if pagination was a bit more automatic and less “click this incredibly tiny next page icon”?

I can go on…