By orthoducks on

Inconsistent user interfaces among forum platforms are a constant irritation for me, and I suspect for many others as well. Among the annoyances:

  • Different editor UIs make it impossible to get comfortable posting messages to any forum.
  • Some forums don't send email when someone responds to a post. I lose replies because I don't remember that no email on this or that forum doesn't necessarily mean no response.
  • Of forums that do send emails, some point to the message thread and some point to the forum's home page, leaving me to find the message myself.
  • If I haven't used a forum for a while, I may have trouble finding it, much less remembering my log-in credentials.

It makes me long for the days of USENET, when I had one place to go for all of my forums (they called 'em newsgroups then), one UI, and one set of credentials.

Why can't we use forums and still have consistency?

If there were a forum API that was accepted as a standard, we could develop forum clients that provide that.

Drupal, as the host for several popular forum platforms, seems like a logical place to start developing such an API.

I'm posting this to find out whether this is a widely perceived need or just my personal quirk, and generally get feedback on the idea.

Comments

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

It's a neat idea but I don't think it would work. Each forum app wants to do things their way and, even if you could get them all to talk, there would be endless bikeshedding over it. Also, Drupal isn't really a good place to start as our forum is pretty weak and would likely get laughed at if we went to vB, phpbb, mybb, etc, and said we want to make a standard. :)

Michelle