I have thought about this as well. This is my first time dealing with a forum of non-professionals. Even professional forums have downvotes. This encourages better behavior.

IMO it would be nice if there were down votes. Also a process for diminishing meaningless posts so that people reading a thread in the future do not have to read through a bunch of crap.

Is this software open source?
Would you be willing to accept changes?

 

OK, no worries.

 

Every forum has a different culture. You can't make generalizations.

Reddit has down-votes and that does little to encourage good behavior. To enforce good behavior requires a lot of moderation work. The well forums that I know of with good behavior and up / down voting are heavily moderated. The voting may encourage better behavior for some, but it causes others to stir up problems from getting down-voted. The voting is more for surfacing quality than for behavior. This forum doesn't have enough activity to require a voting system.

It's Xenforo, which has a commercial license. The code-base is hell. You can create plug-ins for it though.

If I were to do a site like this myself and had a huge amount of time, I would create a wiki and generate a summary from popular threads. Then the wiki could accept edits, etc. This is sort of the model that StackOverflow works on. Everyone sees the forum (answers) component but the site is meant to be a wiki. The wiki features are just not as obvious.

 

Thank you @Rye83 and @TheDude for the informative posts. I appreciate the effort you put into substantiating your thoughts. I wish everyone put forth this much effort.

@Rye83, after reading the referenced links, I agree with the removal of the down votes dislike and disagree options. The main issue being that they did not require an explanation. The forum is about discussion and discussion should be encouraged.

I agree with the SO concept. @Notmyrealname was trying to do this for healthcare in Dumaguete. I worry that that this site might lose it’s free flowing entertainment if it were more wiki regimented. If the users stopped posting then there would be nothing.

I agree that this forum does not have enough activity to justify the development of a voting system.

Here are my thoughts if the forum had more activity:

To improve quality and enable community moderation a feature would be added that enabled a sub discussion regarding the quality of the post. This feature would be an expandable smaller sub-thread/reply chain under a post. A user who wished to leave a sub comment would be guided through a dialog that described the intent of the process. After leaving a sub comment the user could trigger a voting process that, depending on the outcome of the vote, would require the post to be modified or removed. Any post that was removed would be rolled up to one line and grayed. Because the post may have content that should be removed, only adults or specific users would be able to click on and see the content.

Users who were required to modify or whose posts were removed (diminished) would lose ranking and be reviewed for possible removal from the site.

 

This is an interesting idea and it's something which could be developed as an add-on. The team which runs the site behind the scenes is operating at 100% capacity at the minimum. This site is one piece among a portfolio of local focused sites which this team maintains and develops. @Rye83 is a volunteer moderator. It's his efforts which which keeps this forum orderly, so huge thanks to him. I have thrown my hand in helping with things here and there, but at present I'm just a forum contributor as you are.

If you were interested in becoming more involved, then I'm sure that could be accommodated.

You're idea sounds similar to that of Wikipedia likely uses for edits. The process is probably different, but close enough. I still don't think there is enough activity to justify this. There is a small number of contributors who generate a lot of posts. Much of the content is consumed by people passing by.

I believe the wiki concept could be implemented in a way which would encourage posting. People post here to provide helpful information and then discussion flows from there. People would be emboldened by seeing their contributions credited in a wiki format. The forum would still look and work the same. The wiki would largely be separate. Related entries could appear as a post somewhere in thread (as a sort of thread header perhaps.) Discussions regarding wiki contributions could then be handled by that software, which would likely already have those features.

Personally, I think doing anything with this forum which adds a sub-discussion workflow as you describe would require a large effort. I could easily see myself putting a solid week or two into it. Just getting my head wrapped around the flow of the software and setting up the development environment would likely require at least a week. Add another week or two for development. Testing, fixing bugs and dealing with feedback would take at least another week. These numbers are all optimistic guesses. If you haven't touched PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS for a long time then you can at least double these numbers.

If I were to put that effort into the forum then I would also strongly consider moving the software to a different platform. The development team has already considered switching to the same open source software which came out of the development of Stack Overflow. Then I could possibly consider packaging my work as a paid add-on or as an open source offering which might lead to consulting work. Any of these possibilities could result in some compensation for all that effort.

I couldn't swing that effort with my current workload if you gave me a 5 year deadline. I imagine the development team is in the same boat.

Seems like a simple thing...

 

YAY! @Rye83 THANK YOU!

This is just talk.

Agreed. StackOverflow is written in C# which I prefer. I am a big fan of Dapper which also came out of SO.

 

Right, can't be understated. @Rye83 is a skilled moderator. It's not easy and not well paid. But a skill none the less. My thanks as well. The previous admins can take credit as well, but the current regime has been the best.

The software I was referring to is Discourse. Back-end is Ruby and the front-end is a React, which is a JS framework from Facebook.

https://www.discourse.org/

The co-founder of StackOverflow picked this mix because he wanted for the code-base to be widely approachable. At the time, C# was MS and the parent company was heading into choppy waters. Today MS is a rising star with many great OS offerings. Good times.

I still think a wiki route would be interesting. There is currently nothing like this that I know of. I know there would be plenty of contributors. The DI team would be happy to host it and it would make sense if the content were created here. There would be the need of a @Rye83 level steady hand at the helm.