Posting and me

[Flo]

We have been using phpBB ever since we have our own server, equipped with PHP. Recently, I've considered moving a different forum software though, because phpBB doesn't really seem to be suited for fighting spam. Nowadays, as spammers are actually humans, having a sophisticated Captcha is no longer sufficient.

What I looked at as alternative was the Simple Machines Forum (SMF). During that "evaluation", I once again realised how retarded forums sometimes are, phpBB in particular.

Post subjects

Post subjects allow you to specify a subject for your post when replying to a topic, different from the original topic title.

What's the issue?

As if e-mails with subjects like "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: (no subject)" were not enough.
There is not actually a reason to change the subject within a topic. And if there is, the topic needs to be split into multiple disucssions anyway.
Let me explain that based on some examples: From all 20268 posts in my forum, that actually have a post title (that is, which have been posted after the feature has been introduced by phpBB) less than 2900 have a subject different to the topic title. So less than 15% of all users choose a different subject. Which is not surprising, because thinking of a new subject is more work and users are lazy (me included). But even then, does it actually make sense?

• Users choose subjects, that actually need to be in the body of the post, or are already included in the body.
  

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  Post subject                                              Topic title                        Post text
I've donated $10 via PayPal (caogdin@deepwoods.com...     Donors sign up here!               I'd appreciate access information to the beta and forums
No                                                        100% CPU                           No, with the 3.0.116 it's the same 100% CPU burn o..


• They adress user names.
  

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  Post subject                              Topic title
Flo                                       Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...
Re: Flo                                   Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...


• They change subjects unnecessarily.
  

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  Post subject                               Topic title                   
Donated                                    Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...
I'm a donor                                Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...
just donated                               Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...
Beta access requested                      Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...
Donor                                      Donors sign up here! [Patience after replying, tha...


• Completely useless subjects.
  

  BTW...
  whoa
  thx
  Hey
  Well...
  yes
  Thanks
  

So in fact, after looking at a couple of hundred from these subject changes, I couldn't find one that makes sense. Again, not surprising. Users don't have any benefit from a subject change (neither have moderators or admins), so they are either not going to do it, or think they have to and then just put in whatever comes to their mind.

And as if that wasn't enough, the subject title is unnecessarily prominent (so you soon will get subject-blind by that):



PMs and why they suck

PMs (private messages) allows you to have - how should I put it - yet another bucket for "e-mails" to your life. If you are registered in ten different forums, you automatically have ten places to look at for new messages. These forums will even be so kind and send you a message notification to your (real) e-mail inbox, so that you have to process two messages when you get one PM. If you further consider the fact that no PM system is as comfortable and powerful to use as a dedicated e-mail application - eg. Gmail - you shouldn't actually like PMs very much.

In any case - I don't. My productivity (I don't have so much free time to spend on my projects) suffers from these, and thankfully phpBB allows you to turn this feature off completely.

Reports

Aww. On the "user-side", this feature allows you to report posts, which are spam or otherwise offending.
On the "admin-side", this new feature of phpBB makes topics light up in red and makes you spend your whole day deleting reports, of which most are spam. Yeah - I really mean that the reports itself are spam and rarely legit, so that you now have to clean up both spam posts and spam reports (unless you are fine with signs of unprocessed reports all over the place).
And worse: You can't simply turn it off. You can only adjust the permissions to disallow reports, but trying to get permissions right with phpBB is pretty futile.

Having users do the work of spam detection may sound nice in theory, but as I have to read all posts anyway, this is not necessary. (And I believe that there are very few forums out there, where posts are not read by at least one admin or moderator.) What is missing here, is an automated removal of spam posts after a certain amount of reports (for example).

BBCode

*Sigh*. I just want to quote some guy from htmlpurifier:

BBCode can be boiled down to a “wanna-be” version of HTML. I mean, replacing
the angled brackets with square brackets and omitting the occasional parameter
name? How much more un-original can you get? Somehow, I don't think BBCode
was meant to readable. Wikipedia agrees:

--
BBCode was devised and put to use in order to provide a safer, easier
and more limited way of allowing users to format their messages.
Previously, many message boards allowed the users to include HTML,
which could be used to break/imitate parts of the layout, or run
JavaScript. Some implementations of BBCode have suffered problems related
to the way they translate the BBCode into HTML, which could negate the
security that was intended to be given by BBCode.
--

Or, put more simply:

BBCode came to life when developers where too
lazy to parse HTML correctly and decided to invent their
own markup language. As with all products of laziness, the
result is completely inconsistent, unstandardized, and widely adopted.

"You have..." - "I know!!!"

"This message has been posted successfully."
"You have been successfully logged in."
"You have successfully authenticated and will now be redirected to the Administration Control Panel."
"This message has been deleted successfully."

The most annoying part of phpBB ever: The recurring information that you have done something - and every time you have to either stare at the message for 3 seconds or click on "proceed". Think about it! In my case, with 7000+ posts, I would have spent 6,35 hours staring at my computer! And that's only considering the messages for posts, not yet adding any of the other messages. Or alternatively, 7000 clicks. I've had better choices in my life.

Solution: Just don't tell me. I will see that I posted successfully when I see my post, I will see that I successfully deleted a post when I no longer see it, and I will also see that I got into the admin panel when it appears in front of me. I promise!

Microsoft agrees:

A modal dialog box is a poor choice for messages that are unlikely to change user behavior. Instead, consider using a notification or a status bar, or even doing nothing.

And before you actually get a bad idea:

Sometimes optional modal dialog boxes turn out to be annoying, especially when displayed often. Such dialog
boxes typically strive to inform users about a recurring situation or a feature that addresses such situations. A
common solution to this problem is to provide a Don’t show this <item> again option that suppresses the dialog
box in the future.

If you think your dialog box needs a Don’t show this <item> again option, that is a clear sign that it is annoying
and potentially unnecessary. Before adding this option, consider the following alternatives:

- Change the design to eliminate the need for the message.
- Make the hard design decision: do users really need to see this dialog box? Will bad things happen if users don’t know this information? If so, always display it; if not, never display it.

I hate to admit, but Microsoft really hits the nail on the head, even though they often don't follow their own guidelines

Topic icons

Looks like this:


Stumbled upon that in the Simple Machines Forum, after having a test conversion of the phpBB forum (which didn't go very well btw). So you basically have one icon that represents a topic and...a second icon that also represents a topic. More clutter, and no benefit. And as if that wasn't useless enough, you can - at least in SMF - even change the icon per post within a topic!
This this may be convenient for moderators to find topics of a certain type, but it assumes that users actually choose the correct icon for their type of topic, which is not going to happen. So the icons either cause more work for admins (because they have to adjust them) or just make your forum more colourful (just as the reports mentioned earlier. Would like to see that in combination.). Or both. And no, you cannot disable in in SMF (afaics).

I believe that topic icons and the other topic icons can really be displayed as a single icon or a column with a single icon and icon overlays. While I'm at it: Web developers should really make more use of tooltips. Instead of providing those for icons that are not clear on first sight, they rather hide an icon legend at a location which has the greatest possible distance to the actual icons.

Back to fighting spam

Now that I've given some examples when phpBB and the likes make your life harder than necessary and implement features just for the feature's sake, let me quickly show an extreme case of what happens when developers just don't think about users.

Simple situation: A spammer registered at the forum and made some posts.
Action: Delete user and all posts.

Actual steps required in phpBB:

1. Click on user name
2. Click "Administrate user"
3. Enter password for admin panel
4. Click "Login"
5. Click "Proceed..." or wait 3 seconds
6. Two clicks for combo box selection "Delete posts" (@developers: Use radio buttons, or better yet a checkbox "Delete posts". Once click less).
7. Click "Submit"
8. Click "Yes" (I really want to delete this user.)
9. Done!

This way, it's almost less work for human spammers to post spam, than to delete it.


That said, I don't want to offend anyone with this post, it just makes me feel a little relieved. And actually, there are forums, like punBB that seem to be a little more thoughtful regarding its feature set. This forum though is not able to store the "unread" messages, after a couple of hours?/days? it just assumes you have read them even if you didn't. That wouldn't work for me and the CDBurnerXP forum.

So now that I've poured out my grief to you, what about SMF? I'm not even sure yet

There's more...

There are certainly a couple of additional issues with phpBB that tend to annoy. There is no "quick reply" option that would save me from clicking on "reply", moving topics requires a whole lot of clicks (especially the unchecking the checkbox for "ghost topics") and after moving a topic it's shown as unread which doesn't make any sense at all. With no use of nowadays rather common Ajax technology, phpBB3 really just feels like phpBB2 with more features to justify the version bump.

[Ragnarok]

I think this might help you. http://www.forummatrix.org/
I used their Wikimatrix when i was searching for a wiki and found it pretty useful. Mediawiki mostly rules :P. Cheers and thank you again for this great tool.

[katremer]

@Ragnarok
Last time I've visited Forummatrix, phpBB and SMF were the only two decent forums with UTF-8 support. Times may change, though.
Stepping down to a single-byte-charset is possible but requires attention.

EDIT: Sorry for misinformation, there are also Phorum and Vanilla. But they both require extensive stuffing with plugins. I've used Phorum for some time and liked it but don't know how it is doing now. Anyway, it's quite pleasant to use if you are ok with checking new plugins and new versions of them on the development forum and then sometimes even adjusting the code of a plugin to really suit you.


BTW, while registering at this very board, I've gone through a series of screens telling that my registration was unsuccesfull with no helpful info on what is wrong. Seems that I am a spammer if I change the timezone from the default :) And after that, I do not automatically log in when I confirm my email by following the link. Seems that it's time for phpBB 4 that would really notice that it's 21 century now.

[Flo]

Forum matrix is certainly nice, but I'll end up with SMF is pretty much the only choice anyway, at least if I'd also like to have an actively (and constantly) developed project.

[nascent]

That was a good read, thanks for going to the trouble of writing that. I've often thought of doing a forum, and think about the hassles involved moderating and administrating them. Also as a user of many various forums I see your points from the usability standpoint.

I think you're pretty much spot on with everything you say, and I do agree with your decision to stop pms in favour of using email Although I wouldn't trust most people I talk to on forums with my email address, whereas as you say an email notification combines the anonymity with the convenience. The closest compromise is a site-based message system that simply encloses the message from a web form into an email so that the sender never gets the email address of the recipient. If more sites utilized this the web would be a better place.

I do have another point from a user's point of view. Registrations. I hate having to register for every forum I intend to leave a message on, when I know full well I will probably never post there again (note my post count here too). This is why openid and facebook/twitter connect are life saving services. Just being able to click a button that will just log me in to a site I've never used before to leave a message is brilliant. It drives me nuts having to register and remember passwords and such anytime i visit a forum. I end up having to use a friggin' password manager just to see if I've ever posted on a forum before and which password I might have used. Argh!

Anyway, thanks again for the descriptive post it was a great read, and gives great insight to the behind-the-scenes of forum administration.

[Flo]

Thanks

BTW, for your problem, you might consider http://bugmenot.com/ a solution, or at least a time saver.

[nascent]

BTW, for your problem, you might consider http://bugmenot.com/ a solution, or at least a time saver.

Yeah cheers, I'm familiar with them, it just seems the only times I ever try them, the accounts already been deleted or it no longer works.

[judas_iscariote]

I agree that having facebook and twitter login button on this forum is a must have, time saver, If I have time will see if that is actually possible without going insane modifing PHPbb source code...

[andromeda]

What I looked at as alternative was the Simple Machines Forum (SMF). During that "evaluation", I once again realised how retarded forums sometimes are, phpBB in particular

Dear Flo,
I arrived at your site via links from Power Bullet and soon realized it was way over my head. Then I saw something that really offended me. I jumped through hoops to register on the site and one of those was a "legal" agreement that I would not post....."hateful" .... speech in the forums. Yet you are doing it in the News section!
What an I referring to ? The word RETARDED relating to " how RETARDED forums are" meaning how STUPID forums continuing the usage of the word retarded to convey stupid when it relates to a group of people who got an extra chromosome in the womb. SO let's see would you say "how JEWISH forums are" or how BLACK forums are" of course not, that would be offensive ? right? So why would you say Retarded?
It's equally hateful speech and equally offensive. Have you ever had your son taunted on the school yard with words like Retard? and Retarded? Dummy? Well with your continuation of the usage of that word you are helping that to happen.
You might say well what's the big deal why should I worry. Well I hate to tell you but remember Karma? It does work and what goes around comes around.

Plus it's just not good reporting and it's lazy use of English.

[DrTeeth]

Saying how Jewish a forum is is not offensive...it is just and adjective. I'm Jewish and it ain't offensive.

'Retarded' has other meanings other than trisomy on chromosome 21.

Words are only hateful if used hatefully.

You need to pull your head in and get on with live and stop being easily offended.

DrT

[katremer]

I suspect that andromeda is just a troll but still... Some people get really retarded when they try to be correct.

Mentioning that the word "Jewish" is offensive is not only plain logically wrong. It also implies that saying "Jewish" is hateful, and I suppose that the hate must have reason. So, the "correct" person is implying that the word is carrying the hatred with it, no matter the speaker of the word, and thus that everybody share some reason for hating Jews. Say, andromeda, how comes the word "Jewish" is offensive while "American" is not?

Moreover, after all the years of american whining about correctness, I still can't get my head around motives to consider "black" an offensive word to apply to people. It's, like, "black" is bad while "white" is ok.

And, while I am neither black nor Jewish, I would consider myself deeply offended if I would be offered a job solely for the reason of my nation or race. When will I *really* disagree with the american white elites, to the point of being at war? When I will be considered to need a leverage because of having been born Russian.

Instead of fighting incorrectness, people should first forbid stupidity.