Social Network Features In Forum Software

[RateU]

Some forum software add some of social network features to their core features.
Do you think that social network features should be added to a forum software?

[Sama34]

The basics like *Facebook Connect* should be, or at least provide easy implementations for admins.

I don´t know what others feature must be default. Like profile comments, like/rating system for each post, etc.., I don´t consider those default worth

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

Depends on how much I guess.  You could always make it easier to integrate stuff for official or 3rd party plugins.

I do believe that integration with 3rd party services should be kept to a minimum (ideally, none at all).  MyBB's hard coded video bbcode is already way too much IMO, and really shouldn't be a core feature.

90% of the world does not use Failbook, and neither do I, so please don't bloat a forum system with that sort of trash.  Keep it as an official plugin perhaps, which at least makes it easier for me to eradicate all instances of it.

[brad-t]

(05-15-2012 07:38 PM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  90% of the world does not use Failbook, and neither do I, so please don't bloat a forum system with that sort of trash.  Keep it as an official plugin perhaps, which at least makes it easier for me to eradicate all instances of it.

It's not important how much of the world uses Facebook, but how much of your target demographic uses Facebook -- or, at least, is comfortable integrating their Facebook with their forum profile? On my community I would imagine the number is fairly high versus a community like this full of technically minded people where there is a general negative sentiment towards Facebook.

(Also, Facebook has over 901 million active users -- even if we were conservative and cut this number in half, that is more than 10% of the world. And 10% of the world is a big enough number to care, anyway.)

That said, it should certainly be optional.

For non-technical communities, this kind of integration is only going to become more important as more and more people are growing up using Facebook for everything.

More than integration into other social services, forum software need to learn which features of social networking software to implement. Obviously none of us want MyBB to become pure social networking software, but we can look to popular social networks to decide what kinds of features tomorrow's users are going to expect, which include:

• more interactive personal pages
• better user-to-user messaging
• very fast sign-up process
• gamification elements
• Like system
  

just to name a few. A lot of these new features are going to piss off purists, but ultimately it's the only way for community software to stay relevant.

Ultimately, these kinds of features need to behave like "official" plugins, which is to be part of the package but with universal switches to completely remove them from the site if the administrator is not interested.

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

(05-16-2012 04:30 AM)brad-t Wrote:  It's not important how much of the world uses Facebook, but how much of your target demographic uses Facebook -- or, at least, is comfortable integrating their Facebook with their forum profile? On my community I would imagine the number is fairly high versus a community like this full of technically minded people where there is a general negative sentiment towards Facebook.

(Also, Facebook has over 901 million active users -- even if we were conservative and cut this number in half, that is more than 10% of the world. And 10% of the world is a big enough number to care, anyway.)

This is irrelevant to a forum software, which has to cater for all audiences, not just the non-technical crowd.
I don't keep track of how many accounts Facebook has nowadays, but the world population is over 7 billion, so 450 million is certainly a lot less than 10%.

Again, 3rd party integration should be kept to an absolute minimum, completely removed if possible.  You don't know the state of the site in the future - if Google somehow manages to pull everyone off to G+, well, there goes a lot of the appeal of your efforts.
Or perhaps you've only considered western audiences - I would imagine places like China don't particularly use Facebook (for that matter, a lot of the video sites included with MyBB too, which is why I again believe it shouldn't be there) - and they have a lot more than 10% of the world's population.

[brad-t]

Quote:This is irrelevant to a forum software, which has to cater for all audiences, not just the non-technical crowd.

But the software has to be useable for admins who are targeting those audiences. I agree that official plugins are awesome, but it seems dev teams don't like to spend any time on them ...

[RateU]

Thanks for the feedback.

So it means that it should be as an optional. In your opinion or experience, do you think that it will increase your forum activity? I mean a real forum activity, like replying/creating threads?

[leefish]

Well, I think being able to make it easier to use the board is the reason to have options added to core. If having a login integrated with a 3rd party software makes it easier to have members join then I would consider it, but as an option to switch on rather than a fixed feature. I think we see in the member profile today the results of adding in 3rd party options as a fixed feature rather than an option. I had never heard of ICQ until I used mybb. I would not be against offering users a way to share views of their other activity on other websites via a plugin on profile, but my interest is people posting on my site, not using my site as a point to jump off to posting elsewhere.

What I do think is a good idea is notifications about board activity

Here is an example: I did not have many posts or threads on my board. I had a lot of visitors, and members returning but not posting. I installed a plugin (unread posts) and have seen posting activity increase from an average of 15 posts a day to about 45. We have not had a lot more members, it is just easier for the members to see posts they have not read. I know some MYBB users say there is the new posts thing but that is unreliable - it depends on last login and so members were missing posts.

From a users perspective all the plugin really offers is a link in the header to all unread posts and a number to say how many. Now, given this kind of increase in posting with a plugin reporting how many unread posts from all areas, I wonder what a notification to say that a subscribed forum or thread has had new posts would do? The information is there in MYBB (there are subscribed forums and threads) but it requires the user to go make a trip to the user cp. Most users cannot be bothered to click through like that - ideally I would like that to also be a notification in the header - "You have x new posts in your subscribed threads/You have y new posts in your subscribed forums" and on click rather than dragging the user off to the userCP it takes the user to the list of posts.

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

(05-17-2012 12:54 AM)brad-t Wrote:  But the software has to be useable for admins who are targeting those audiences. I agree that official plugins are awesome, but it seems dev teams don't like to spend any time on them ...

A 3rd party plugin that works well is fine too IMO.

(05-17-2012 06:26 AM)RateU Wrote:  So it means that it should be as an optional. In your opinion or experience, do you think that it will increase your forum activity? I mean a real forum activity, like replying/creating threads?

Variations can be large, but honestly, for most forums out there, it's probably more of a placebo benefit.  If you've got a forum with no good content, you're going to get poor contribution regardless of social features or not.  If it's got good content, you'll get activity, again, regardless of of social features.  As most forums fail, these features perhaps just simply let the forum live for a bit longer, but it won't stop them from dying.

Stuff like social groups, profile comments etc probably don't have too many downsides to them, apart from being bloat if not being used.
As leefish perhaps alluded to, practically no-one uses ICQ any more, yet it's a living relic in MyBB.  The way it's done makes it very inflexible to add new services and remove old ones.  Which is why I say no to 3rd party integration.  Spend effort improving stuff like custom profile fields, and admins can add/remove stuff like ICQ, MSN themselves and don't waste time actually integrating them.  Can always have something to make it easier for noobs to have it by default or something.

Ideally everything has its own on/off type switch, but I think having too many isn't exactly good design either.  Something like MyBB just sorely lacks in modularity.

[RateU]

(05-17-2012 07:49 AM)ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote:  Spend effort improving stuff like custom profile fields, and admins can add/remove stuff like ICQ, MSN themselves and don't waste time actually integrating them.

I think if MyBB had a strong features for custom profile fields, we don't need the ICQ, MSN, Yahoo ID and etc, because we can use the custom profile fields for that. It means that each Admin can decide whether they want to add it or remove it (related to the modularity).