Thoughts Concerning Forum Software

As this writing  is a collection of my ideas  that have not been written down before now,  this page
will be  gradually updated and refined  whenever I recall  more and more of my ideas  concerning the
topic and feel the want.


I'm privy to several different forms of  software facilitating Internet discussions and all of that.
I seek to create my own system at a point and,  as with other things in life, I believe problems and
the mistakes of others are a prime source of inspiration.   Accordingly, many of these thoughts will
involve what other such systems do well and do poorly, I think.  Be aware such a system of mine will
include functionality from my 2018-06-06 article.

Firstly is identity.  Systems that don't support identity whatsoever lead to informal identities and
systems that don't support anonymity lead to so-called ``throwaway'' identities.   It is clear to me
that a good forum software should have full support for both anonymity and verified identities.    I
also find it important to have identities that aren't protected by any such measures;  none of these
three types  should afford anything greater than recognition,  that is someone with a  verified such
identity would have that made clear in the interface and nothing more.  I'm inclined to believe lack
of identity should be the default,  but any proper interface will allow one to provide suitable such
defaults.  In any case, none of the three should be inconvenient in relation to the rest.

I'm of the opinion that,  the more options a system makes first-class,  the better such a system can
be.  If the system explicitly provisions for some things, then a machine can be made to scan through
such things and perform operations on them;  meanwhile, if it doesn't explicitly provide the option,
yet people still want it, then there will be informal use of it; this could be expressed as having a
``signature'',  using a very specific writing style,  or using other first-class features to imitate
the desire, varying based on the particular provisioning that's lacking.

Secondly is quality.     A system should be designed to encourage messages that are considered good.
This is ultimately something a human moderator would need judge, however, but that doesn't mean help
is impossible nor impractical.   Tying in with this,  a system that highlights information in a nice
and structured way would be beneficial to this goal;  an example is including a summary of a message
or a list of topics such a message involves.  It follows from this that adding fields and other such
mechanisms to a message  and perhaps requiring they be used  is one way to enforce messages that are
perhaps more likely to be good.   Another example of this would be message length minimums.  This is
in contrast  to a system that is entirely unstructured,  which hinders many kinds of analysis,  from
both human and machine.   I'm also of the belief that subtle cues can influence this; if you want to
encourage longer messages, the tool to access them should only show a single message at a time.   If
you want to encourage, say, attached files to a message be relevant, then show them in a way that is
inhibiting to using them for other purposes.   If a particular quality found elsewhere is considered
undesirable, try to eliminate it entirely.

Thirdly is another form of structure,  tying into the first-class options.    Many such systems lack
structure and require notation to be written out manually.     Following is an abundance of mistaken
notation that detracts from messages and fails to fulfill its purpose.     I'm of the opinion that a
good system would support  whatever is wanted of it in a primary way  and so ultimately have no such
notation, thus giving the option of any notation with which to denote the semantics.   An example of
this is rigidly enforcing that a message in response to another message must communicate it in a way
the system is acutely aware of and in a way that prohibits invalid responses, such as a message that
responds to itself.

Fourthly is opinion of fellow forumgoers.  In theory, a means for others to rate a message according
to how well it fits its stated goals is good and even obvious.     In practice,  this leads to those
others rating a message according to whether they personally liked it or not.   Thus, a forum should
not reify such a thing,  as it clearly doesn't work well.   For some messages,  it is appropriate to
have  a flagging ability that alerts others  that the message should be removed,  but this is rather
distinct.

Fifthly and lastly is focus.    In particular,  I find a forum that focuses almost purely on outside
events to be rotten.     Generally,  such forums discourage long discussion and one could find there
isn't much there if such a forum were to ever lack an outside venue to prey on.  It's my belief that
a good forum focuses on what its own people are doing and not with what others are doing, elsewhere.
No different than a rating system,  this is another feature of some forums that is poor in practice,
and I see no good that comes from it;  a lack of such focus forms a malaise around the entire venue.

Long discussions are necessary for a good forum,  I believe.   Some venues will have discussions die
out after mere hours,  by design,  and that won't lead to much good discussion at all,  I think, and
even if it does it will merely fizzle out soon thereafter.  To have a conversation carry on for days
or weeks or even longer allows much more complex thoughts to build up and improve it all in a cycle.

It goes without writing that a good forum isn't proprietary in any way.   As someone who has staffed
forums, I also have ideas concerning discussion moderation.   In general, an automated system should
remove or deny any message that can be automatically detected to be poor;   this can be as simple as
rejecting  messages consisting of a single letter or word  to as complex as  detecting patterns that
indicate unwanted discussion,  such as a message that is a disguised advertisement.     Anything the
machine  can't do with certainty should be delegated  to alerting a human;  this includes  detecting
words that are considered commonly used in poor messages in some ways, but which can't be made known
from messages  that use the words in other ways,  and also messages  from identities that  have been
shown to be a nuisance and may warrant closer inspection for a time.     The people of the forum are
also able to report messages found to be poor  and I'd recommend different pools for alerts from the
machine and from humans.

This sums my current thoughts concerning forum software.  I intend to make my thoughts more clear in
the future and my developing an actual such system that includes these ideas and more will work well
towards that.
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