Moot.it: Forums and commenting re-imagined

http://moot.it

by tipiirai • 14 years ago

28 57 14 years ago

moot.it

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

We've been doing this for over two years now but we're getting closer. Should be out this month.

alexchamberlain• 14 years ago

How is it free?

selectout• 14 years ago

My guess is they are cookie-ing browsers and doing data collection/retargeting.

JLehtinen• 14 years ago

The concept of internet forums has mostly been gathering dust for the past ten years while the ways people discuss over the internet have changed profoundly, so some re-imagining is definitely in order.

courtneycouch08• 14 years ago

Seems no one has made any real serious attempt to really modernize them.

mbesto• 14 years ago

Stack Exchange?

dorian-graph• 14 years ago

I'm not sure of what you're imaging but 2 recent new sites somewhat related are:

http://www.branch.com/

http://www.pivory.com/

kybernetikos• 14 years ago

indeed. this particular service looks good, but reimagining is a strong word for what they've done if the screen shots are anything to go by.

courtneycouch08• 14 years ago

Theres a link to a demo on the bottom to play with it.

joonix2• 14 years ago

Not really. You are just looking at the top, progressive layer of the web. There are still tons of niche forums using old software like vBulletin but with lots of traffic. Anything from car enthusiast sites to bodybuilding.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

That's true. I think JLehtinen refers to the fact that if you are about to pick a forum software on your site today you still have to choose from these very old systems.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

Is this related to the Moot?

sirclueless• 14 years ago

Doesn't look like it, but quite a silly name choice for a product around online discussions.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

Moot = verb (used with object) to present or introduce (any point, subject, project, etc.) for discussion.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/moot

Cannot think of a better domain name.

Osmium• 14 years ago

"Moot" is an Old English word for a meeting, which I believe is still in modern usage. I've heard it used at any rate. So not that bad a name really.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

Not related to Christopher Poole in any ways.

aw3c2• 14 years ago

the demo has no pagination (infinite scrolling instead--9, permalinks are awkward to find and without javascript you get an empty white page.

courtneycouch08• 14 years ago

Infinite scrolling is actually not going to be there in the final production release.

yyyt• 14 years ago

I see it took some good ideas from Stackexchange. Good. Since there's no contact email, I'm writing questions here:

1. Is it configurable, to get rid of "likes" and other cluttering elements?

2. I'd like to pay for not tracking my users. Is this possible?

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

1) Not in v1 but you can simply hide those like and other "clutter" with CSS since the forum is sitting on your site.

2) The data will reside on our servers and it's public. Later we'll have private posts too.

lewispollard• 14 years ago

Perhaps the live demo shouldn't be flowplayer's customer support - when I clicked through to the demo the first thing I saw was a bunch of people complaining and I didn't realise for a while that it had gone to the flowplayer site, and made me think it was people complaining about moot. Just something to consider!

courtneycouch08• 14 years ago

That's just temporary. We rushed out an early build of moot to coincide with the HTML5 Flowplayer release. The full moot release with dedicated moot demos is coming up eminently. I had the same thought as well actually.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

Yea. You are so right!

Flowplayer simply offers us a very good platform to make it production ready. It is relatively high traffic.

ericcholis• 14 years ago

How SEO friendly is this? I know that some more popular systems provide a regular dump of static content that you can embed yourself.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

This is definitely on the top of our priorities after v1 laungh. Just want the first version out sooner than later and we excluded this feature in purpose.

There are two ways to implement this and we'll study these under flowplayer.org site. And on server it's definitely a static dump every day.

Omie6541• 14 years ago

The design reminded me of Vanilla forums [1]. Its very much like their default theme [2]. I see some features from Stack Exchange. + sign reminds me of Google+.

Its real time, I get it. I get notifications of who signed in and signed out, nice. this is may be new for forums software. but reminds me of chat rooms.

To me it is few things collected together, other than that I didn't get what exactly got re-imagined. is it just the easy integration ? Could you please elaborate ? or just a simple list will do. or am I missing something explained already ? in that case a link will suffice.

Is there a dashboard where admins can check statistics [and that kind of things] ? How does it look like ?

Also, just as a note, I didn't register on demo forums only because I couldn't use Google/Twitter account.

[1] http://vanillaforums.org/ [2] http://www.forum-software.org/demo/vanilla

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

I listed a few points on this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4726735

The closest competitors for us are (or how we see this) are

- discuss (for commenting) - google groups (for forums)

And we think the biggest advantage is indeed on the integration. Moot sits so nicely to any website and it can be further tweaked.

bobsy• 14 years ago

I don't think this will make a good general forum. The comment box is small. It doesn't look like it would promote lengthy responses with images / video and whatever else.

For me the main problem with forums like phpBB is noise from signatures / profiles / layouts etc and noise from nonsense responses. Often the best response will be buried in page 2 or 3. 5 people will be having conversations back and forth and everything gets mixed up.

I think the closest thing to a good forum for me is stackoverflow. Where the best responses float to the top. Similarly reddit handles separate conversations really well with the way it nests responses.

That isn't to say Moot doesn't have its merits. For providing support this looks pretty handy. Its zippy and the small comment boxes promote quick and to the point responses. For a general content based forum though this currently looks inadequate. I could also see this being useful as a message board for a development team. That kind of utility.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

Well there should be nothing stopping you from writing lengthy, thoughtful posts – there is no 160 character limit, (in fact, there's no limit). There are line breaks, paragraph breaks, syntax highlight, black and white (vectorized) unintrusive smileys... And the text box does expand while you type (unlike the one I'm typing into now) and shows you a preview underneath it. Images/video are kind of separate from discussion and tend to draw all attention (you already mentioned signature/etc), but if it's what you need, then this is not the solution for now.

lakshmivyas2• 14 years ago

The comment box expands as you type.

chandika• 14 years ago

Keeping customers inside the site is a priority for some (vs. pushing some discussions to say zendesk) and this fits in perfectly.

btw, may be make the 'try live demo' link a bit prominent and have a hint about how to close the fullscreen carousel on the homepage? had me confused there for a moment.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

We'll do the official release rather soon so we don't put too much efforts on that beta intro page.

Thanks anyway.

pessimism• 14 years ago

I’m creating a new forum CMS in Django for fun basically, if anyone wants to kick the tires of it and try something newer than the usual CMSes: http://pygm.us/nPrOiHJo. I don’t know which Greek letter you’d use for its progress, but it is not in any way close to a beta. It can be deployed to dotCloud in a handful of steps, though.

Disregard the Travis CI build failure; I think it was just a time-out on their end.

It’s funny, because I don’t really think it’s imperative to reimagine forums; they are perfectly fine, but it is next to impossible to build a business model around them, which leaves us with some very unsatisfactory and ancient CMSes to use.

I see so many awful CMSes, and it bothers me that we don’t have anything better to use. I’m delighted to see moot.it take a crack at it. I honestly can’t recall anyone else who tried to make an interesting business around forums ... ever? At least outside China.

So regardless of how moot.it looks and works at the moment, they should really be commended for just trying where others have given up without even bothering. As someone who has worked on a forum CMS, I can attest that there are so many small things in forums you need to implement and get right, that you end up with a road map light years long.

What I am saying is that I commend moot.it for just trying. Some of the comments here suggest that there are dozens of great forum CMSes to choose from, which I don’t find to be the case. Better to help them polish the software, because the alternatives are few and often unsatisfactory.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

Thanks! You can be sure that we're doing this very seriously and we see a lot of business opportunities but more about that later.. The fact is that we're not afraid to get the Big Load of Many forums.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

No, no, no. I refuse to invest any hope in a forum that is not interested in doing properly nested comments. How are your comments systems any better than Disqus or (the superior in appearance and functionality) Livefyre?

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

Nested comments is something we actually decided not to implement. Look at this HN thread for example. It's very hard to follow and see what are the new ones. Sometimes I search for "minutes" to get entries that are within last hour.

If you want to branch out from a reply that's a new topic. We'll make that easier on later versions but definitely not nested comments.

lakshmivyas2• 14 years ago

I am not sure if nested comments are really necessary for a forum either. For example, I see a lot of hacker news threads link to other threads in the same post where a response has been provided (I see one in this post as well).

However, I think user addressability (@xxx) is important in a flat forum.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

This is basically what a forum is, though. Commenting services like reddit, HN, and Disqus obviously differ, but they are altogether different than forums.

It's obviously still okay to dislike this structure, but that's what forums (bulletin boards) are basically about.

tipiirai20• 14 years ago

I think you are seriously wrong about this. Nesting is a feature and many think it's a bad one.

Moot.it: Forums and commenting re-imagined

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