The format of this forum

Does anyone else find the layout and format of this forum to be lacking?

Not really trying to complain, just I haven’t been on a non reddit/discord community in forever and this layout is giving me hard nostalgia for the message boards of the 2000s.

As an example. I got to the just chatting category because I searched something random, then clicked it at the top. If I go to the community page I do not see this category at all.

Another example, as I write this, I went to right click “community hub” so I could open it in a new tab and double check my claim, but it is not a link, its some JS button I guess.

Ah, The community hub is its own space, and own entire page, separate from the lesson discussions etc.

I had to ask chatGPT what the platform might have been that I recall fondly creating my own pages on, getting skins from a dedicated board for that etc; it suggested “invisionfree” and that might be right, but its close enough. Those types of message boards would be perfect for a place like this.

I can get used to this though, just reminiscing about web 1.0 I guess.

I don’t know much about these things but if I right click on community hub at the top of your post I can open a new tab.

I find the community forum format ok. I’m not a big fan of the Reddit format.

The just chatting section is a subheading the Community hub section which you can access from the main community page.

I find it better than the other forums I look at. I follow some for motorcycles and they really are awful.

It’s probably just a matter of personal taste and “getting used to”.

I prefer this kind of forum, it’s not as cluttered and chaotic as boards like reddit are (for me, I must admit). You can easily navigate between different areas and find what you look for.

It is quite clear structured and the layout is kept simple and straight forward. I like this a lot as it is not distracting me and it is easy to read on web and mobile phones. But that’s just me.

No, it’s just me, too !
I can only underline all of what you have said!

Hi Taylor,
I actually only know this one, and the previous one from Justinuitar before this took over, which took me a day or 3 to get used to… Aaa, but I’m also more of a 1.0 man

I hope you find your way ,you can always ask

Greetings Rogier

Thanks for stating your concerns

This Discourse has it pro’s and it drawbacks.
It can be somewhat challenging to come in to at times but its flexibility and stability work for us.

You need to find what “workflow” works best for you; there are several ways to do it.

Category based

• See it as 1 big table of topics, sorted in categories and subcategories. Filtered as it were.
• Click on the Justinguitar logo on top. it takes you to the categories.
• There you get everything in that category or choose a subcategory to filter deeper

I don’t use that often but when I have more time, I go through the performances and I reach them via the categories because the filter is CATEGRORY and TOPIC; what is it about?

Based on what’s new (my prefered method)
The ‘filter’ is TIME, what is the most recent?

I usually use there buttons

• “New” topics for me to check OR
• “latest”, to check the most recent comments etc being made
  

It’s funny how people’s perceptions are developed based on familiarity with certain platforms.

Discourse, the software used for this community, is considered “Web 2.0” by most, and even “Web 3.0” by some

Note that “Web 3.0” is largely about moving away from centralised, single-entity controlled platforms like Reddit and FriendFace and having a much more distributed, but connected, ecosystem. Social networks like Mastodon and the Fediverse in general are good examples.

Ultimately, it’s really just a different style of presentation: hierarchical threaded versus flat threaded.

Personally, I find Reddit clunky and awkward to use, and I can’t see how moving from this modern, Web 2.0 approach to one modelled after Reddit would be an improvement.

Cheers,

Keith

Hey Taylor,

I suppose your first few lines explains it; you’re just used to something else.

Having been around endless types of forums and chat groups for 30 years, back to the old BBS, Usenet, ICQ, IRC etc, its all just an ever evolving thing, much moreso in those earlier years.

And having been part of literally hundreds of these forums - even managing and designing a few myself in the early 2000s - I’d say this one, based on the Discourse platform, is right up there as far as layout, ease of use, transparency, navigation etc goes. Its just a different custom implementation of Discourse than what you may have seen.

So, just persevere mate. I guarantee you’ll come to appreciate it, as it opens up for you. Just like learning guitar

P.s. the other great feature of the Justin Community is that it’s also by far the best moderated forum I have used. All the other ones I follow regularly have threads that end up as abusive arguments between 2 or more people - it’s just unpleasant and unnecessary. I’m happy to say that this rarely happens on this forum presumably because of the vigilant moderation. Moderators also reorganise and merge some threads that are on the same topic etc. It makes it all a much more pleasant experience. Sorry, that’s a bit off topic of the original post which was about the format of Justin Community rather than how its run, but a well moderated forum is certainly a more pleasant one to use and often neglected in other forums.

Me too Rogier! I was pretty happy with Windows 3.0 back in the 1990s.

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Hey Trundle, it’s really a Q and A forum, with occasional boasting of one’s own horn and some videos of us all learning to play. I’m not sure what it is you think is missing. What would you do to change it and make it better?

I’d say the boasters are the ones who arrive here, post a video, then don’t respond, never add anything to the Community and then disappear. Fortunately they are a tiny minority.

Don’t know when 1.0 was, but I started in 1996.
Seems you didn’t know those old web pages and forums, now this is a dream compared to back then.

And I tried to get used to discord and always have a hard time there.
Once you take just a tiny bit of time, it all navigates easily in the tree-alike structure, easy quoting functions etc. … well on my system at least. Different OS or browser and it might behave a bit differently.
But like was said above, mostly a matter of preference and getting used to.

I guess you’re joking! Started on DOS, then Windows 3.1 and I don’t remember the latter with a lot of affection

KIdding??? What’s not to love about a Kaypro II computer with lime green type and 5.25 inch floppy disks?? And then I got an Apple Macintosh II.

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Ah, but this one looks nicer to me than Windows 3.1
And I found most often working with DOS much quicker.

PS. Remember when you installed a new program and had to use 20 floppies or so? That must have been shortly before CD drives were introduced…

This is kind of drifting from the topic, but…

Roughly speaking:

“Web 1.0” was the original, largely static, websites with limited interaction (basically limited to forms), and started with the invention of the web in 1991.

The first HTML websites I created were in around 1994 and, in those days, some web browsers didn’t even support tables.

“Web 2.0” was then introduction of dynamic website content that could act as real applications rather than simple static content. Some early examples of this were in the late 1990s, but it really didn’t get going until broadband became commonplace in the early 2000s.

In fact, I remember an early fashion brand launching an interactive online store in around 1999 and promptly going out of business because the experience was too unresponsive for most people, who were still on dial-up modem Internet.

Web 2.0 was driven by changes in web technology that supported applications that could execute in the browser (Javascript) and the ability to asynchronously communicate between the browser and the back-end server (AJAX).

From the early to mid 2000s, we started to see more interactive capabilities, things like blogging, and the launch of various social networking sites, sites like Youtube, etc.

Online forums, are early examples of social networking and the “Web 2.0” movement, although the technology has evolved significantly from the early PHPBB systems.

“Web 3.0” is, about de-centralisation and (according to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web), the semantic web, although I don’t see this catching on much.

It’s also linked with blockchain but, IMO, blockchain is still something that (outside of “cryptocurrency” commodities) is largely a solution in search of real problems to solve.

Discord is really a real-time chat platform, similar to WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc.

Chat platforms tend to be highly unstructured, often pretty chaotic, and very “in the moment”, which means they aren’t great for posting structured information or having focused conversations, as anything posted on them typically has a short shelf life (often an hour or less) and conversation topics tend to be interleaved and difficult to follow.

Personally, I don’t think chat platforms are a good way to build a community or to have meaningful, long-term discussions.

Cheers,

Keith

Interesting!
I remember creating a few websites and how I got really really good at having my graphics the smallest size byte-wise, yet looking good and how many sites didn’t seem to follow the principle.
Still today, many pages (or most) can be a bad experience when you’re traveling with a bad connection or wifi isn’t great where you’re positioned.

Thank you Keith for your informative post!

Keith, I love your descriptions of the technical world. Please keep sharing! Even though I’ve been around since before the internet, and have always worked in technology-centric or adjacent fields, I always learn something.

yes, the format of this forum is different from old classics like vBulletin and phpBB. It took me a little time to get used to, but thankfully this forum isn’t the only one I use that uses Discourse.

IME, the quality of a forum has less to do with what software runs it than it does on the folks who run it. The moderator staff, in part, but also the paid folks on the backend who make decisions that even the moderators are bound by. I’m on one forum where they introduced an AI bot to ask for clarification and get attention for posts that have been ignored. It’s bad. Supremely bad. That kind of thing guts a community.

Haha I remember gaming on those.

The 1980s haha

You died of dysentery.