Something I really like about the Drupal.org site, and something I don't see really being managable outside of it, yet, except if core is used exclusively for the most part, is the fact that ALL the nodes posted (outside the issue cue) are all forum posts.
I've noticed on a couple of other sites that I visit that, for example, consist of blog posts with a separate forum section, most of the dialog and discussion that develops with visitors goes straight into the comments section of the node and the forums collect weeds, comment spam and dust. "Community" development is limited to comment threads and the consistency of content posted to the front page nodes, and conversation outside the comments? Non-existent.
You'd think people who missed out on BBS'es were allergic to forums, and will only post to them if your whole site is PHPBB or the like.
Has anyone had any success or any particularly good ideas about how to avoid having the forum section die? How about using the forums in place of comments? I seem to recall this was possible at one time, long ago, and haven't seen anything else like it in some time (the consensus seems to be that Drupal's forums just suck and should be replaced with "X" generally, but to me, it's more a matter of how one handles them).
Comments
Not a direct response, but
it can be interesting reading nonetheless --
A recently published study compares the use of blogs to forums (or, as they call them, "threaded discussion tools") -- the article only examines use in an educational context.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
I don't have an answer either, but
A friend of mine runs several very successful, traditional forum-based sites using vBulletin. He suggested that people are used to forums having the forum discussion front & center on the home page and might be confused when they encounter both forums and blogs (or images or events etc) that also allow comments. I definitely believe that most people are intimidated by the "create content" link vs. creating a forum topic. Creating content sounds like something you had to do in high school English class. For that reason we've stripped out all references to intimidating words like "publish" and "content" and created a custom "Post Now!" page that explains and links to the various content types.
You can see how we do it by registering at one of our sites below and clicking the "Post Now" link that appears when you're logged in.
http://www.yourmtb.com
http://www.yourclimbing.com
http://www.yourrunning.com
Our forum traffic is okay, but it could use improvement and we're open to ideas. (The running site is very low traffic because we just launched it).
It takes a lot of detective work
It takes a lot of detective work to not only track topics, but also tie them together with other topics/threads that may be related.
For example, here's one of the important conversations (imho) that's running across the drupalsphere:
http://www.angrydonuts.com/no_more_support_by_email
http://www.angrydonuts.com/more_on_emails
http://www.angrydonuts.com/another_post_on_email_and_suppor
http://buytaert.net/scaling-community-support
http://drupal.org/node/101720
It would be nice to figure out a way to not only aggregate related comments/threads, but also provide an easy means for members to identify topics that may be important to the community. Possibly some sort of digg style functionality? Or better yet, is there a way to do something similar to Techmeme (http://www.techmeme.com/)? Obviously you can create a link trail (as I did above), but I'm not even sure what the rules of the road are (i.e. do you post on drupal.org? drupal groups?, which group(s)?, is it frowned upon to link to one of your posts?).
Gus Austin
Director of Chaos and Confusion
PepperAlley Productions
What am I trying to do with Drupal?
Gus Austin
Would Node Queue help?
I haven't actually used it myself, but I've been meaning to look at Node Queue for this sort of thing. It's still top-down, not Digg-like, but it appears to help tie disparate nodes together. Perhaps it could be extended to support remote urls as well.
I always wondered...
Why there wasn't a news feed that did nothing more but provide a place for people to post new news feeds?
Why shouldn't aggregation allow self-discovery?
Syndic8?
Not sure what you mean by self discovery, but Syndic8 is where a lot of new feeds are announced, though maybe not as much as a few years ago.