And Another Entrant Enters

by Zef Hemel

Denis Krukovsky sent me a link to yet another tag board: tagBoard. At its first look it looks a lot a group blog, but let’s be honest tag-based forums are not that different from a group blog other than that eventually the group of “bloggers” can grow into the thousands. It’s all a matter of how you present your data.

Of all the tag boards I’ve seen so far, this probably is the most basic one. There is no tag cloud, no social digg-like features. It’s just a place where anyone can post and comment on posts. Instead of categorizing the posts into boards and categories the discussion starter adds tags to his or her start post. I’m not very much impressed with tagBoard yet, let’s hope it will improve and the developer(s) will come up with some unique features.

Yesterday I talked about plagiarism. On that same topic, have a look at this: tagBoard about and Blogoforum about. Hmm?

I’ve been thinking about glorum a bit more and got quite fascinated with its approach to moderating the posts. People vote posts up and down, if you like it you vote it up, if you don’t (for example because it’s a flame or spam) you vote it down, if enough vote it down the post disappears. I really like this concept of social moderation. They are already being used on some news websites, such as as slashdot I think.

As I feel more people are starting to develop these kinds of tagged bulletin boards I think we should come up with a proper name for them. I myself sometimes use tag board, tagged board, tag bulletin board, tag-based board. What do you think?

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11 Commenti

  1. Personally I don’t really like the social voting. It works to some extend however a single rotten apple can ruin the whole thing. And let’s face it, on tweakers it doesn’t work that good. You see complaints about it there all the time (often for a good reason). The theory is nice, but in practice there are always people who mess things up.

    #1 Wezz6400

  2. Where can I find a demo of the forum? I can only find http://www.appbbs.com/forums/, which is Phorum.

    #2 Dietrich

  3. I don’t like “voting” at all:
    1. It opens the service to the “tyranny of the majority”: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html .
    2. Some kind of people don’t like “voting” and will hardly ever vote.

    Better approach would be to provide something of value to users. For example, Blogoforum introduced user’s “reading list” as a way to store interesting messages.

    #3 Denis Krukovsky

  4. Dietrich, the page I linked to IS the forum for as far as I know.

    #4 Zef Hemel

  5. I have been thinking about how people will name the category, too.

    “tagged-board” or “tag-based forum” or something similar was an obvious way to name it and think about it.

    But lately, focusing exclusively on the tag-based classification and pushing the category with a “tag” in the name doesn’t feel right anymore.

    I think there is a lot to explore beyond tags and I doubt that tags alone will be enough to make the new model.

    More opportunistically, ‘tags’ as a buzzword seems over or almost over.

    #5 Mario

  6. Well, I don’t see any “tagBoard” over there, only a website (Drupal) and their forum (Phorum). And if they seem to have ripped from Blogoforum, we shouldn’t pay attention to them at all.

    #6 Dietrich

  7. I just thought a bit further.

    The page you linked to is not a new sort of message board package, it’s a Drupal site that is configured to show blog posts on the frontpage. And yes, you can use tags for about every “node” in the Drupal CMS. What’s even more, the favicon is the Drupal logo and the HTML source contains references to Drupal. Above that, the colours are Drupal’s default ones.

    I thought you know Drupal, so that’s why I was asking where the “tagBoard” is. So it seems this is a big mistake. :D

    #7 Dietrich

  8. Damn Dietrich, you’re right. I don’t know drupal well, but it seems you’re right. Well in a way drupal can function like a tag board a bit then ;)

    #8 Zef Hemel

  9. I didn’t download drupal neither, I must admit I thought it was phpnuke.
    Having read somewhere in the past days (a comment here) that drupal can deliver the required features, it was interesting to have something visual to look at.

    #9 Mario

  10. Have you had a chance to play with bbpress?

    #10 Mario

  11. One thing I implemented early on in terms of social rating in 1l is karma. Users and posts have karma. Every time a user creates a post, they risk some of their karma, and if they run out of karma they can no longer post. The way you increase your karma is by posting good topics and having people rate them well, but if your post is rated down, you will lose even more karma, and all this is proportional to the amount of karma that you risked in the first place.

    If you want to see the code behind it, it’s pretty simple stuff.

    #11 Peter Goodman

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