Gripes
Hi! I'm not a really big forum user, but this format is making my head hurt and I wanted to lay out my troubles while we're still experimenting.
To begin with, I should note that my primary use case centers around the devtracker; my bookmarks go directly to it, I scan for threads by red posters that I try to keep up on, topics that seem relevant to me, read largely just the red posts, the posts immediately around them for context and any quoted material, plus some responses to that quoted material. I may or may not skim GD thereafter.
I'm fundamentally against nested commentary as the default state; I frequent many forums and view each thread less as a conversation and more as complete document. Nesting makes me constantly afraid that I'm missing information, and worse leaves me feeling lost without a consistent conversational thread to follow. The only time I find the nesting setup useful is when the conversation turns to a back and forth between specific members of a given community instead of a general commentary on a topic. Usually opening up a couple tabs to follow a series of quotes back handles the situation well enough, but I could see a case for segregating that conversation out and following it up individually. I can't follow and don't see any value in following more than two people engaged in a back and forth discussion simultaneously. If a piece of text is quoted for direct response by more than one party, each separate discussion thereafter merits its own tab.
I actually quite like the proposed voting system as a general filter for both topics and individual posts, and I can understand the need for some kind of self-moderation given the huge scope of the community we're dealing with. I don't, however, want to lose the benefit of linearity through such a system. Highlighting entire discussions based on their vote totals and/or some algorithm of the votes on individual posts inside them is useful and I would be happy to use a "most popular" or "most discussed" or what have you view of forum, provided I have some way to prioritize looking at new content when I'm done with whatever is tracking best. Inside each discussion, I get incredibly lost without a linear setup, but I'd love some way to filter out the "noise." On the smaller forums I frequent, that just means knowing who to put on your ignore list, but a voting system that hid irrelevant or pointlessly brief content while still showing a comment had been made would be useful.
Nesting aside, I'm not a big fan of a tagging system instead of separate room approach I'm used to, but it's not a big deal. I am confused as to why those tags are sitting beside the text of the lines instead of above or below them. Putting the search and sub-community control panels there eats up enormous amounts of screen real-estate and awkwardly shuffles the text over to the left. Moving that panel to the top of the screen and possibly rolling all the "sub-communities" into a dropdown menu, (perhaps with checkboxes to really take advantage of tagging) and then expanding the discussion space out to the right would help quite a bit.
Finally, I'd really like individual posters to be better called out. Larger avatars would help, as would a stronger boilerplate for each post. Perhaps an underline separating it from the content?
