On Friday, 23 February 2018 at 13:47:16 UTC, biocyberman wrote:
From my experience with forum platforms like vBulletin, phpBB,
Invision Power, and even interfaces of Google group, and Github
Issues, I still find it very difficult to understand the logics
of using dlang's forum.
You make it sound like "I even learned clay tablets" :)
1. No post editting. After clicking send, and found out that
you made mistakes in the post, but you can't edit the post
anymore.
Stackoverflow has this feature, and it's pretty popular on forums
too, because when someone abuses editing, people complain that
discussions make no sense anymore.
2. Old-day quoting presentation. I always feel reluctant to
read texts that stays after two levels of quotes, like this:
>First post quoted
>>Second post quoted
>>>Third post quoted
>>Second post quoted
Stackoverflow and github have this feature. Though normally web
interface hides the angle quotes, so they shouldn't interfere
with reading.
3. No Rich-text format support. No minimal bold/italic support.
Some tools to emphasize important points will make it easier
to let the readers know what the posters want to say.
Bold and italic is a wrong way to format text because it's visual
formatting that lacks semantic. You can use markdown to add
*emphasis*, it's pretty intuitive, stackoverflow and github have
it too. Emphasis only expresses emotions, which can actually
distract from content, you better spend time expressing ideas.
4. No code formatting. Same feeling here. I am reluctant to
post more than 5 lines of code.
run.dlang.org
5. No image support. In many cases a screenshots will be
helpful to communicate problems.
abload.de
6. Last but not least, a trendy feature: tags, keywords for
threads so we can locate related threads easily.
Usually nobody bothers to fill them, so they won't give you any
result.
If I may say it honestly, and despite the useful 'save unsent
draft' feature, the forum is by far the most user-unfriendly
forum platform ever (by appearance).
If I were to order them by user-friendliness (in descending
order):
dfeed > forums >>> github > stackoverflow > skype
