#“Die Die Die, Discussion Board Software, Die.”
There is one area where the internet has gone backwards in the past 10 years and that's discussion sites. From 1992 to probably 2003, I got a huge amount of information using Usenet, more than I got on the web. Unfortunately, despite still existing in 2011, Usenet has become a spam hellhole and most discussions have moved to the web.
If you go onto most of these sites, you'll probably see vBulletin, phpBB, BBPress or some other crime against humanity powering it. I must be one of the few technical people in Ireland who has made less than 10 posts on boards.ie since it started. Possibly less than 5. I only ever end up there if it's a google result. I value my sanity and time too much.
The usability on all of those sites is truly shocking. I am stunned that people put up with it. Back in the day.......hold on whilst I get my pipe and slippers.......we had incredibly powerful desktop apps called newsreaders. Emacs had a great one called Gnus but my favourite was Forte Agent. This was a tool built for managing a deluge of intricately threaded messages and it did so brilliantly. You could monitor, find, filter and score everything you were interested in so that you could get in and out as quickly as possible.
Here's a sample screenshot:
Now let's have a look at the crap people are putting up with in 2011. Over on XDA-Developers, there is a discussion about DeFroST which is a superb community firmware for the HTC Desire. It's what I run. Here's a screenshot:
Note what it says: Page 1 of 1812. 1......of.......1812. That's state of the art for discussion software. One thousand eight hundred and 12 pages of unorganised messages about a single subject.
As for threading. Hah! The best attempt I've seen is a reply to a reply.
All of this stuff was figured out in the 90s. Can someone please please please build a webapp version of Agent or Gnus or even the ropey one in Thunderbird and finally make all these dinosaurs extinct? And the first person who mentions Quora gets a clip around the ear.
