The inim­itable Aussie Lee Bork­man has cre­ated a forum appli­ca­tion ala Joel0nSoftware (which, by the way, is an absolute must-read — great stuff). It’s writ­ten in Cold­Fu­sion, in Fuse­box 4 (although due to host­ing con­straints, a tem­po­rary Fuse­box 3 ver­sion is up).

Lee’s forum is a great imple­men­ta­tion of Joel’s forum prin­ci­ples, which are part of Joel’s phi­los­o­phy on how online com­mu­ni­ties behave. While some of his ideas make sense for new com­mu­ni­ties, I don’t par­tic­u­larly agree with all of them, par­tic­u­larly for estab­lished com­mu­ni­ties. As a reg­u­lar user of forums, I kind of think that I’m qual­i­fied to com­ment too. Lee has sum­ma­rized the most impor­tant ones as:

1. No thread­ing
2. Con­ver­sa­tions are sorted by the date they were CREATED, not by the date they were last updated
3. Direct quot­ing is discouraged
4. Con­trols appear at the bot­tom the con­ver­sa­tion, to encour­age the user to actu­ally look at the his­tory of the discussion
5. No facil­ity to receive email alerts when a par­tic­u­lar con­ver­sa­tion is updated
6. No reg­is­tra­tion
7. Unob­tru­sive (sneaky) “dele­tion” by the mod­er­a­tor of unde­sir­able con­ver­sa­tions or comments.

Now, no thread­ing is fine — I agree with Joel’s asser­tion that Usenet is atro­cious in that respect. I love Usenet, don’t get me wrong, but a few months ago I had to seri­ously cut back on things that were mak­ing me less pro­duc­tive and unfor­tu­nately Usenet got the chop. Most of what goes on is just whin­ing and argu­ments about seman­tics anyway.

I absolutely love the sneaky dele­tion of posts — in Joel’s forums the posts are invis­i­ble to every­one except the orig­i­nal poster, so they think that no one is inter­ested rather than get­ting all up in arms about being cen­sored. I can think of a few peo­ple I would like to apply that to.

Direct quot­ing is one issue where I’m not 100% sure of my stance. Used selec­tively, I think it can be use­ful and time-saving. But I can see the neg­a­tive side too.

To explain what I don’t like about the other prin­ci­ples listed, I’m going to use the Port 80 forums as an exam­ple. Port 80 is the local Perth web indus­try asso­ci­a­tion, and the forums have been going for nearly 18 months. I’m a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor, and while I don’t have any real stats, there’s def­i­nitely quite a large group of peo­ple (maybe as many as 15 or 20?) who read daily and post reg­u­larly, for the most part. The inter­ac­tion is techie-based but largely social. Orig­i­nally the forum was using Ikon­board, but changed recently to the ubiq­ui­tous phpBB.

Reg­is­tra­tion is impor­tant, I think, to develop rich online per­son­al­i­ties. You get more of a feel­ing for what a “per­son” is like by their post­ing icon, their sig­na­ture, their num­ber of posts. It’s part of the fun. The longer the forum has been estab­lished, the more impor­tant this is. When my post count eclipsed the forum originator’s, he bought me a beer at the next phys­i­cal meet­ing (he sub­se­quently caught up and passed me again). When some crazy Dane eclipsed my post count, despite not join­ing the com­mu­nity until much later, that was a sig­nif­i­cant and remarked upon event too. It all adds to the char­ac­ter of the forum.

Hav­ing the posts listed in the order they were cre­ated and the con­trols at the bot­tom, to force peo­ple to read every­thing, would dis­cour­age par­tic­i­pa­tion in well-established com­mu­ni­ties, I think. I know that I can go to the Port 80 forums in my lunch­break or while I’m wait­ing for some­thing, check for new posts, and be my way. If I knew that process was going to take seri­ous con­cen­tra­tion or con­sid­er­able time, I’d be less likely to do it so often.

Same with email noti­fi­ca­tions. Usu­ally, I’ll only use this if I’m very closely fol­low­ing a thread and want to know the instant it is updated, or if I’ve posted a ques­tion and I really want to know about any answers, with­out need­ing to check back every five min­utes (which is no good for the host’s traf­fic costs, either — a def­i­nite con­cern in Aus­tralia, where we have “bound­less plains” but pricey band­width). Take away email noti­fi­ca­tion and peo­ple might for­get to come back and read more. When the Fuse­box forums RSS feeds died a while back, it was quite some time before I even realised that I hadn’t been there for a while. Luck­ily, now they’re back.

So while Joel Spolsky’s forum app might work for the appli­ca­tions he’s using it for, I wouldn’t want to par­tic­i­pate in one of his myself. I can imag­ine it would work for a soft­ware sup­port forum… but not for an active com­mu­nity, where time-saving fea­tures are what help peo­ple take time out of their daily sched­ules to par­tic­i­pate, where reg­u­lars will read every post any­way, and where the sense of com­mu­nity — which is enhanced by reg­is­tra­tion — is what attracts new users and encour­ages them to stick around.

But then again, what do I know…