Vanilla vs Discourse (Reply to Plex Post)
Plex churned, and last may they posted about their reasons for moving to Discourse. I'd like to address some of their points. I'll try and make this post self-contained so the original post on their forums does not have to be addressed.
Discourse has a flexible posting drawer
Plex mods seemed to like Discourse's commenting UI. This amounts to a comment box that sticks to the bottom of the page and can be hidden/revealed with a mouse click. This is a fairly nice feature and is certainly useful for moderators that are posting in a high ratio to reading. It also helps with multi-replies, another feature useful mainly to moderators.
I've often thought of a similar UI, but it has a few challenges:
- It can hurt accessibility and we have an increasing number of communities that must cater to the accessible experience.
- It can hurt brand-ability on larger sites that must display a rich corporate footer. A sticky foot UI and other UI tricks like this really lock the look and feel of the site. Something we see brands time and again disagreeing with.
- A UI promoting "quick draw" commenting can be against community best practices. While moderators need to comment a lot, users should be encouraged to read the entire conversation before commenting and leave more thoughtful replies.
Link Previews
Discourse previews links you are entering. Our new rich editor does this too and it does it better. The rich editor offers a nicer WYSIWYG experience that is better for most any user. I side-by-side source/preview mode is really cluttered and off-putting to casual users.
Discourse has infinite scroll
All of discourse pages don't have pagination and will automatically pop in new content as you scroll. This is a feature we are thinking about since this is becoming more of an expectation on the web today. Here are a few of our concerns:
- Infinite scrolling can again make a brand footer impossible. We need to make sure we have a solution that works for large companies that need to express a larger web presence than just their community.
- Infinite scrolling can hurt SEO. Research is required into the trade-offs.
- Infinite scrolling is not appropriate for all content. For example, search results are often a bad user experience with infinite scroll because it leads users to feel like they haven't found anything.
The main point about content coming in automatically, rather than having full page refreshes is valid and we are working on updating this in Vanilla.
A topic overview panel below discussions
Discourse has a topic overview below the initial discussion. This is a nice feature. I don't think we will do something like this as it clutters the experience for casual users without really much benefit. However, there is one piece of data there that we do need...
Related posts
Showing related posts below a discussion or in the side bar is absolutely something we should be doing. The knowledge base will bring this functionality and we will use that R&D to add something similar to discussions.
Per-discussion notifications
Allow users to set notification settings on a per-discussion bases. This is something a lot of users are asking for in Vanilla and is something we will do once we have the message queue. Right now you can sort of do the same thing with bookmarks. Just bookmark the discussions you want notifications on,
Search enhancements
- Discourse shows categories and tags in search results which is a nice feature. This is something we are looking into.
- Discourse has a tag filter above discussion lists. This is also a good feature we should have.
What Plex is Giving Up
I want to address some of the points Plex made about what they are giving up by going to Discourse.
- Vanilla has more flexible usernames (including spaces). This is something that people can probably live with, but it's interesting how rigid Discourse is.
- Vanilla has a more flexible category structure while Discourse only allows 2 levels of nesting. I notice that the Plex mods spun this as a win for Discourse because it's simpler which is quite tragic. Vanilla can structure exactly the way Discourse can and do more. We should encourage communities to use a simple structure when they are small and go more complex when they grow. Maybe Plex made a mistake for their community size, but they shouldn't always think a small structure will suite them.
- Vanilla has a full set of reactions. I think users will miss this one. Moderators may not care, but should be thinking about the users.
- Plex had a Plex-pass only section with ideation with Vanilla, but cannot have a restricted section with Discourse. Even though the Plex mods were spinning this as being "more open" I think they are really giving something up here. With Vanilla, being able to configure per-role access to categories allows for sections that enhance customer ROI. Moving to Discourse has removed a feature that paid customers had. Vanilla has done many communities with complex permission structures and I think this is something we should highlight more in case studies and blog posts.
Comments
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Tim was looking for this today, thought I'd share here incase anyone else is. This is the original post from Plex:
We’re moving our community forums to Discourse in June! After researching and testing several solutions to address the shortcomings of our current forums platform, Discourse became the clear winner. It provides many advantages, including flexibility, configurability, tag-based filtering, and a more modern conversational approach. The new platform is modern, feature-rich, stable, and brisk.
TL;DR
Primary transition work is happening in May with the launch expected in the Wednesday, June 20 to Thursday, June 21.
Features galore! We’ve detailed some of the new features we’re excited about below, but here’s a recap:
Flexible posting drawer: The auto-saving drawer lets you reply to a thread while reading, referencing, or quoting another topic. See who is typing in real-time and load replies (and their edits) dynamically even as you write, without refreshing. Get a real-time preview of your formatting, too.
Dynamic thread reading: No pagination, replies load dynamically as you scroll. A timeline slider lets you jump to a specific moment in time, or to the end. The URL is coded with your exact location in case you want to share or reference a specific reply or a place in time in the discussion. It’s brisk!
Topic details at a glance: An expandable drawer shows thread stats, community participation, and a roundup of the links posted in the replies.
Control over notifications: Granular control over how you are notified for subscribed topics, categories, and tags, with different options clearly explained.
Smart search: More relevant results in less time using a combination of search terms, categories, and tags to refine results in one step.
Forum usernames: We’ll be separating the forum user identity from your regular Plex account. Effectively, this means that you’ll have a separate “forum username” in additional to what you may already have been using with your Plex account (and thus in the existing forums). You’ll be able to see and edit your forum username upon first login to the new forums. Discourse has stricter username requirements, that include not allowing emails, special characters, or spaces.
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