Rethinking Discussion Boards
by Zef Hemel- Published:August 9th, 2005
- Comments:12 Comments
- Category:General
For a couple of years now, people have been thinking about the semantic web; a web where information is neatly ordered and beautifully structured. This would allow search engines to truly look for information and come up with better results. It’s a little how the web originally started. When we still used <h1> tags, and tags like <strong> and <em> instead of <b>, <i> and <font>. These tags mean something. They are about semantics, not presentation.
Anyway, the problem is that if you want to do the semantic web right, there’s a lot of work involved. The problem is getting people to do all this additional work and do it truthfully. For example, usually, words in the title or heading on a page tell the reader what the text underneath is about. So, if you were a search engine, finding a word in a title would make it more important than just in the plain paragraph text. However, people would abuse this, so a search engine can’t use this information.
Something that people have started experimenting with on several places are tags. There’s blogging software that allows you to “tag” your posts with some keywords. Other services like del.icio.us, allow you to publish interesting links you’ve encountered and to tag them. Tags are all just a word long, so it’s really easy to add them. If I look at del.icio.us now, the most popular tags are web, software, programming, design, blog and tools. Other websites like flickr, use tags to tag pictures. This gives very interesting insight in what people are posting pictures about. If you go watch flickr’s tag page you can see the most popular ones (the bigger, the more pictures posted).
Yesterday, by accident, I found two other sites that use tags: 43things.com and 43places.com. On these websites you can tell people what your goals in life are and find people who share them, 43places.com is about places where you want to go and people who have been there (who can share their experiences). All goals and places can be tagged, and using these tags similar goals and places can be found. When I saw 43things.com, I started asking myself: how could tags help forums?
I’m always interested in different approaches to currently well-established concepts, such as forums. Is it worthwhile trying to use tags in forums? I’m not sure, but here’s one possible approach. My idea is the following: drop the concept of boards. Just have one big namespace, if you will, for all your topics. If somebody starts a new topic, he or she can tag it (or not). The tags will replace the boards. In the case of programming related forums one could for example ask the question how to do a particular kind of for-loop in PHP and could tag it with ‘php’ and ‘loop’. Tags could either be free-form or predefined, I’m not sure what would work best, but I’d probably be in favour of free-form tag names. On the forum front page the latest topics would be listed, but also a list of tags and the number of (new) topics that are tagged with them. This could be done in the nice visual way like flickr does here — it would give an instant view in what people are talking about now.
How do you know the topic starter will tag the topic right? You don’t. That’s why I think it would be best to allow any member to add tags to any topic, or even to remove them (but maybe removing them is something for a moderator to do?).
Why would you want to do this? What are the advantages? I think the advantages are the following:
- No longer the ever-lasting “Did I post this topic in the right forum?” question. Every topic fits anywhere, a topic can be about PHP and dish washers at the same time, no need to choose between the PHP and dish washer board.
- Users could subscribe (on the forum itself or through RSS/Atom?) to certain tags or combinations of them. For example, if I’m especially interested in using PHP on the client-side, I could subscribe to all topics which are tagged with ‘php’ and ‘client’.
- It provides a mechanism to show “similar topics” for each topic. Imagine that after a posting a reply to a certain topic you get to see a screen saying “since you knew the answer to this question, you might also be interested in these topics”, which would list similarly tagged topics.
And what about tag names? One could tag a topic either ’scripting’ or ‘programming’, which basically mean the same. How would someone only subscribed to ‘programming’ find the ’scripting’ topics? Well, I could imagine applying some interesting statistics here, dealing with similar tags or people quite often tagging something both ’scripting’ and ‘programming’ from which one could deduce that they may be very similar. One could create very interesting graphs from how tags are used and may relate to each other. Sites like 43things.com already show “related tags”, so it is definitely doable. I can imagine even showing a list of popular tag combinations, which would be like naturally evolved boards.
The beauty of tags is that they are simple. It’s not a lot of work to tag a topic, and by tagging a topic it can become a lot more useful. It could turn forums in more of a knowledge base, something that many people have been waiting for a long time.
Again, nobody will know if this concept will work or not until somebody tries it. So, if there’s somebody out there who wants to create not yet another bulletin board like all others (YaBBLAO), you may want to give this concept a shot. It’s at the very least a lot more challenging than the traditional model.
12 Commenti
Good idea Zef, serve me design, programming and standards please!
I do think this is a great concept, but I fear it would be too much of a drastic change for people. I think the allowance of tags as an extra would work, but completely dropping forums altogether would scare people who are new to forums and do not know what to do. I think that there should still be forums, and posting in these forums would give it an additional tag of that forum. So that way it will definatly appear in that forum but it is also easier to search for. The forums could also have extra tags to search for and put in that forum. So a PHP help forum could have the default tags of [php] and [help], but also search for [stuck], [problem] etc. There should also be the ability to have it so they must have a few tags in. For example, you wouldn’t want to serach for the [php] and [help] tags, and get every single topic to do with help, and every single topic to do with php. So a combination would be good. This tag concept would also allow the ability to allow multiple forums for one thread. So if something falls in 2 different forums, it wouldn’t matter because it would appear in both. It would also be good if the forum software also automitically generated tags, using keywords in the title and in the content. So if the title was “need help with php”, it would read help, and php and automically tag them. I think with a little development, this concept could possibly become the new type of forums.
I think that is a fantastic idea… one of those things I wish I’d thought of myself.
I would keep the ‘board’ based view, but each board would merely be a query to show a set of related tags. Posting a new message in that board would pre-fill the tag list with the tags for that board, which you could of course change, or add to.
If you don’t mind, I shall be borrowing this idea - at the very least to see how feasible it is
Wonderful idea, no more hierarchy enforced from up-high but a real community of people.
This is however the most likely reason some will resist it: The current hierarchical system support a hierarchy of users, moderators and administrators each with their own little kingdom to protect.
Maybe one could add the concept of “posts” to a wiki and then use this idea of you to organize them?
Wondering: How to keep treading working when each user had it’s own unique view of the current conversation (different tag sets)? Should a post automatically get the current tagset of the viewer? Should replies inherit the tags of the previous post (the one or more of which it is a reply to)?
Gideon, I believe only threads are tagged. Replies still appear sequentially. I had the same idea about a month ago, I termed it “Liquid Forums”
I think there’s still value in a hierarchical view — after all, concepts (tags) are partly hierarchical. After time, I think the information collected about the relationships between tags can be used to build the hierarchy. If someone posts from a hierarchical page view, the related tags might automatically be applied or suggested.
Every liquid forum on the web would be compiling some piece of the true relationships between tags, the tag information could be aggregated to construct the complete set of relationships between tags. The tag relationship data, I think, would be very useful to traditional search engines. Posters would be unknowingly using their knowledge of the world to categorize it — it’d like an army of data-entry people applying human sense to information.
I can see users compiling a list of “interests” — tags that they want to read about. In a special liquid view, they could see only new threads pertaining to their interests. I’m already implementing some of these ideas in a project of mine.
I was going to link to the topic on tfi but someone beat me to it
I also have 3 other (remotely relative) links for you:
1. http://www.getvanilla.com/ I don’t know if you’ve seen this board yet but it kind of throws away the concept of forums and categories, With tags it would be sort of what you’re describing.
2. http://zniff.com/ which uses the spurl.net db as a backend for a search engine. Of course it wouldn’t work for a BB but it’s worth mentioning
This this test forum I made last night, just for testing:
http://www.pixelcarnage.com/projects/wolfforum/index.php?browse
An interesting concept - however although it lends itself to a more free-form style of poster, it doesn’t really help those people who are looking for a more structured approach to their data.
What about those people who want to implement tags that make sense to them, however make little sense to the community at large?
What about posts and topics that are intended to be announcements? How would you discern between postst that should be an announcement and posts that are simply tagged as “announcement”
And perhaps the most significant difficulty - what about permissions? One of the most popular features is a robust set of permissions - if the boards are dynamic, how would you be able to effectively prevent people from seeing other content?
If you ask me announcements don’t belong in the forun so there isn’t any point implementing them.
All tags are sorted by date, so if someone makes a new tag or two and they don’t choose good names for them, you can still see that there are topics. But most people would probably use normal tags.
Permissions? Keep it simple: have a level from 0 to 100 for every type of action and give users a level, only users with a level equal to or greater than the perm level can perform that action. You don’t have permissions for every single tag, but only for the entire board.
If you want an admin only board, just make a private forum elsewhere
It’s a nice idea, maybe this could be put into an existing board or a fork of it. If anyone dares, I can help with making a fork of my UseBB board, without forums but tags.
I think some degree of hierarchy in forums is good. Otherwise, forum sabotage is too easy (spam, flamewars, trolls, etc). Tag messing by people who find it’s fun should be prevented, maybe by giving enough power to moderators.
interesting