Moin, Am Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:31:55 +0000 (UTC) schrieb Valerio Bruno:
> I don't understand your sentence. Forums haven't threaded view ?! > Anyway... Yes, in my (and probably Sebastian's) part of the Internet, phpBB does not count as a threaded forum. Based on http://aktuell.de.selfhtml.org/artikel/gedanken/foren-boards/ (sorry, it's in German, but there are clarifying pictures) I'd make a distinction between a forum, which is inherently threaded (not in the phpBB-sense), and a board, which is flat (like phpBB). A thread in a forum captures the more natural way of discussion: someone says something, multiple people reply, maybe focusing on different aspects of the original post, the discussion might drift away in more than one dimension, sub-aspects get discussed, maybe even the topic changes completely: (A, B, C are people; 1,2,3... are aspects of the subject) A says 1, 2, 3 B responds to 1, 2, brings up 4 C responds to 1, 4 (from B's post) A responds to 2, 4 (independent of C's post) C responds to 1, brings up 5 A responds to 5 C responds to 5 (from A's post) etc... Graph-theoretically speaking: Real[tm] threads are trees. (Well, actually, from a real-world point of view they should be directed acyclic graphs, meaning that one could reply to more than one posting at a time. But that just adds all sorts of headaches and is difficult to visualize. It's like multiple inheritance in the programming language of your choice. But I digress ...) A 'thread' in a board, like phpBB, is inherently flat, one-dimensional, restricting. There's always only exactly one subject being discussed, and it's harder to cherry-pick the aspects that you want to reply to. Especially if you want to reply to an aspect that has been brought up several posts ago: A says 1, 2, 3 B responds to 1, 2, brings up 4 C responds to 1, brings up 5 C responds to 1, 4 (from B's post) A responds to 5 A responds to 2, 4 (independent of C's post) C responds to 5 (from A's post) Trains of thought that ought to belong together are separated by this structure, and completely unrelated aspects are forced to stand together. And now imagine being a new person D and wanting to say something about aspect 3. That's why phpBB postings basically must make use of these "@poster A" forms, and even that doesn't help too much if the posting being replied to was 30 postings (read: 3 "pages") ago. There's a reason that the 'classical' discussion systems (usenet and mailing-lists) model real threads. Oh, and yes, some boards offer proper threads as an optional view. But that's hard, because replying in a plain-board style loses information about the intent of the poster. It's easy to transform a forum view into a board view by just throwing the "who responded to whom"-information away, but it's impossible the other way round. And finally: Should the discussion really be one-dimensional and flat, well that's just a special case of a tree and no problem at all for real forums. -- Henryk Plötz Grüße aus Berlin ~ Help Microsoft fight software piracy: Give Linux to a friend today! ~ _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community