Show HN: We built a platform for forums and called it Microcosm

by buro9 • 12 years ago

41 22 12 years ago

buro910• 12 years ago

Author here.

Microcosm is the first startup by us, and it's taken a while to get out of the door as customer feedback changed our initial plan and most of our priorities.

The initial plan was to take forums and evolve them into a flipboard/Verge style magazine of user-generated content. But actually people just wanted really good forums that were more capable of providing tools that communities needed. This mostly came down to "We want events and other stuff to be organised where the people are hanging-out", and we found that the magazine approach set expectations that people were consumers rather than creators of content.

We are a Shopify or Tumblr, but for forums.

And the obvious question amongst the HN crowd is how do we stack up to Discourse? The answer is that the forum market is HUGE and we see Discourse being the equivalent of a Wordpress (a comparison they themselves have made) whilst we are the equivalent of Tumblr. We're a hosted platform obsessed with simplicity for the admin and users, not an installable piece of software.

An example of what we're doing: http://forum.islington.cc/

A forum on that site: http://forum.islington.cc/microcosms/114/ Note that events exist within forums and not in a separate global calendar.

An event page: http://forum.islington.cc/events/79/

Another example: http://forum.espruino.com/

A conversation with images, code and video: http://forum.espruino.com/conversations/706/

Ask me anything.

huhtenberg• 12 years ago

Some basic feedback based on first impression, if you don't mind.

1. On the landing page - the row of faces at the top is off-putting. Something is just fundamentally wrong with their mouths, they just look ... freaky.

2. Links to the examples should be at the top. How a forum looks is the first thing that anyone would want to look at, not that you "help to grow my community".

Re: forum design itself (going by Espruino example):

1. TOO MUCH VERTICAL WHITESPACE. I'm on a laptop running at 1080 lines and 96 DPI and I can see only 8 threads in the index of General section. That's simply unacceptable. That's something that a designer with a Mac would produce for his designer buddies :)

2. Each index entry has 4 information bits. "Started" and "replied" aren't really needed, they just take up the space.

3. Bunch of other nitpicks -> You should really consider adding a whole bunch of alternative designs, including a way for others submit their own designs to the publicly available gallery. The importance of visual candy and stylistic variety is exceptionally important. As I said above, forum appearance is the first thing everyone looks at - that's your chance to impress and the way to do it is with the variety.

But all in all - it's a good and meaningful project. Break a leg.

buro910• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

On #1 and #2 on the landing page... I agree with both. Those line drawings looked way worse with teeth, so our relative perception is that these are better, but we shall revisit it.

On the more critical things with the product...

#1. Too much whitespace.

This has been a hard fight for us, that single issue, as the vast majority of forums set the font far too small (10px) but information density is high. We've used vBulletin and phpBB as our compare point and we show 8 items per page where the default theme from those would show 10, but ours are far more readable. We think our defaults are fairly good, but want much more active sites so that we can create meaningful A/B tests on the front sizes and white space. It's definitely one of the more frequent pieces of feedback.

#2. Started and Replied are extremely critical.

Remove them and engagement drops off. Started helps people choose, from the newer items, which ones they want to read and reply to, based on who started it. Replied is extraordinary, remove it and people do not go into the item and make their own reply, they stop engaging with it. People tend to hit the page of items, scan for who made the last reply and when, and then make the decision to go into it. The ones who make the most comments navigate by the engagement of others, not by the topics and subject of the items.

We experimented with that, and even the absence of the last author's name on the list of forums continues to generate feedback. We think we can just about get away with that one, but the numbers are strongly against removing them from the item list.

#3. Agree wholeheartedly, a number of designs are possible but our defaults today are equivalent to Twitter customisation.

We plan 3 levels of theming and customisation and they are all effectively supported already but not yet available for a number of dull reasons.

The first: Twitter customisation: Logo, background colour/image, font colour. We support this today.

The second: Upload your own CSS (with some security restrictions), or pick from a theme gallery.

The third: Fork https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb , put it on Heroku, and fundamentally change all HTML, CSS, UX, everything.

Today we only expose #1, and anyone can go do #3 already. #2 is designed for, but we haven't yet built the security bit.

We do have some far more attractive examples of forum than the ones I've shared, but they're currently testing their communities and it would not be right for me to make them public before they are ready. We will definitely update the linked examples of forums once some of the really good looking ones go public.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely put the vertical height A/B test back on the urgent todo list for when the numbers will make it meaningful.

revorad2• 12 years ago

Congrats on the launch, David and team. Quick first impressions from trying this out now:

1. The Persona sign up surprised me a bit. I'm ok with it, but if you're aiming at non-tech folks, it might be a bit of a problem. Do you offer a normal email+pwd signup too?

2. I chose a name for my forum and signed up with Persona. After logging in, I'm expecting to see my forum, but this is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/lWG9Ta0.png

Not sure what to do, maybe I need to click "Add a site"? When I do, I realise it's for creating another forum.

Oh I didn't know I was making an account which allowed me to make multiple forums! Also, using "site" and "forum" interchangeably threw me off.

3. Ok, so what I was first looking at after signing in was my dashboard. So now I go back there, and I notice the tiny greyed out link babies.microco.sm. Click on it and it takes me to: http://i.imgur.com/FI5HKPF.png

"This is such a new site that there are no forums."

Now I'm really confused. A site has multiple forums?

So I'm not logged into my own forum? Click on Sign in or Register in the top right corner.

Persona again! Now, as a forum owner nerd I might be ok with it, but other users of my forum almost certainly won't be.

Anyway, sign in. Then click on "Create your first forum" and get these two questions: http://i.imgur.com/75GNpQ6.png

"What is the name of the forum?" and "What is the forum about?"

But I thought I already answered these questions when I first signed up!! -> http://i.imgur.com/QirI0Sx.png

Anyway, I do that and then my forum is finally created and I was able to make a post and reply to it. The Microco.sm logo on my site/forum is confusing. It'd be nicer if you used the name of my site by default instead.

That's probably enough for you to go on for the initial UX :)

Caveats: I've never run a forum and I'm unlikely to do so in the near future. I did this purely as an exercise to try your app out. So, take it with a giant boulder of salt.

buro910• 12 years ago

You've raised some good points.

We're already changing the account dashboard as it's likely that most people will only run 1 or 2 forums, so a list is not ideal. We're going to take you straight to editing the forum colours and logo, rather than to the list of sites. And if we keep a list it will only appear when a second site has been created.

Agree on the bad interchangeable use of forum and site.

Persona is a strange one... every technical person raises it as an issue and some get confused by part of the process, but no users have. We've got 70 year old cyclists excited that it's the first time they've ever joined a community and engaged with it, and 16 year olds equally joyous at just being somewhere others who share their interest are. None raise Persona as an issue, but it does keep coming up from technical people.

Given that Persona feels like it's in flux (recent HN item on it), we may re-visit this to ensure that even the tech people are happy.

biot2• 12 years ago

On your pricing page, every plan except the cheapest one shows up as "Cheapest plan". And the $99/month (per site!) plan doesn't have half the benefits the $10/month plan has.

buro910• 12 years ago

This is a confusion created by us that was not intentional and the designer is looking to fix very very soon by gutting that part of the page.

The compare + pricing is comparing our offering "Microcosm" to our competitor offerings. It isn't comparing various packages we offer.

We only have one plan, it includes everything.

Though other founders suggest we invent another couple of plans to hit the Goldilocks "too hot, too cold, just about right" method of selling.

And yes, Vanilla is strangely priced considering the market, but they do have some compelling features too... everyone draws up their comparison tables to favour themselves. I actually wanted to promote the fact that we don't support signature at all as a positive.

eitland• 12 years ago

Just want to say that I'm happy to see someone taking on stack.* and discourse.

Stack.* turned toxic (imo) and discourse seems to still have no real site after two years, just a sandbox that is reset on a daily basis. (I might have missed something here but I honestly tried to find examples.)

luckyisgood• 12 years ago

Looks good!

I'm looking at the pricing table here: https://microco.sm/compare/ . The plan that is highlighted by default to me has a price in British pounds while all other s have prices in US dollars. Consider changing that.

buro910• 12 years ago

Thanks.

And I've just changed it to a dollar amount.

Here's hoping deploying that landing site under load won't break anything.

jeswin• 12 years ago

If you're asking for the community's help, you should not have this in the TOS.

"access all or any part of the Service in order to build a product or service which competes with the Service;"

I have been working on an open-source forum platform for a while now. I do not intend to copy anything or break your TOS. Haven't used your app yet, please delete my account.

Honestly, I am a little upset that you chose to put such a thing in the TOS. Maybe you just copied some template, in which case please update it.

buro910• 12 years ago

Hey jeswin,

Thanks for catching that.

We actually put our legals under source control to help find flaws, answer questions about them, resolve issues and to make it easier to see changes over time.

https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal/

I hadn't seen that particular clause and agree with you. I'm fine with you or anyone else, who is working on anything else, accessing and using the service even if you are a competitor.

It's an error on my part as the lawyers have included that as a default phrase and I do not agree with it either. We've even open-sourced the frontend under a license that would conflict with this clause: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb

I'm speaking to the lawyers again on Monday, and will raise a Github issue for it to ensure it's resolved.

It will be dealt with, that is not how I want our terms to be, and my apologies for not catching that specific clause when I reviewed the documents.

David

PS: The issue: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal/issues/1

Cthulhu_• 12 years ago

"We only make money when your community is successful" scares me; would this mean a forum like I own (with 500K pageviews / month) would end up paying out of all kinds of unwanted orifices.

Glancing over the comparison, I'm noticing one possible discrepancy: "Default legal documents to reduce your liability" are available in pretty much all online services like these, the terms & conditions and the like. I know that vBulletin also has forms for registration of minors and the like. I'm also pretty sure those terms & conditions are tl;dr documents of legalese nobody bothers to read though.

The software itself... it has pagination, woot. With the minimalistic style and html (compared to vB / IVF) I think you could do with infinite scrolling (optional depending on device, it's still kinda sucky on mobile) or something clever like that.

I want to make a remark about the apparent lack of functionality, but that would be unfair; I'm a vB user, the only things I use on there are just reading and writing posts. vB forums like mine often do have a lot of user post customization though; postbits with all kinds of information, personalized (and larger) avatars, tl;dr signatures, custom post styles, that kinda thing. It may sound trivial, but it's a form of self-expression a lot of our users appreciate. See also: Tumblr's user's eyesore styles.

The events page is neat, and as far as I know not something the competitors have in that form - looks like an unique selling point to me. Code / image / video embedding is also neat.

buro910• 12 years ago

"We only make money when your community is successful" scares me; would this mean a forum like I own (with 500K pageviews / month) would end up paying out of all kinds of unwanted orifices.

Damn that phrase, now changed.

This is actually one of the more subtle and interesting things. Our business model is based on two things we know:

1) Communities already create transactions and revenue as a by-product of conversations and engagement

2) The majority of forums never break even and are a cost-centre

When looking at which problems forum owners want solving, aside from the technical things (installing, updating, security, backup, configuration), and the social things (engagement, search, features, schisms, moderation and permissions), the recurring concern is that forums seldom to never pay for themselves.

The thing we're fixing with our business model is just that... how to make a forum financially viable to the site admin and the users.

We do this predominantly by pushing down the costs by having a platform with efficient software and design.

But we also do it by recognising that solving some of the problems "Our community wants events but right now they're on Facebook, EventBrite, Meetup and Google Calendar" helps to return some of the externalised transactions back to where the community is.

We plan to charge service fees, as per eBay or Meetup, for things like selling tickets to events, or for helping to handle payments for classifieds.

No user of a forum that isn't selling something is going to be paying, and nor are you as the site admin (except the low flat-rate fee for owning the site).

But we will add features to help bring more transactions back into the community and where others (you or your users) make money from those we'll charge service fees for facilitating them.

It's the difference between pushing down the costs aggressively and helping forums make money through transactions, that is where we believe our actual revenue will be. We really think that by entangling our success with your success means that we have to make the right product for the forum users and forum admins. We can't just sell you hosting and walk away from you... we have to make sure every user is happy and your engagement stays high... we need to make sure the UX is awesome.

On the legal docs, we asked our lawyers to draft three documents that help protect site admins from various things: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal

Namely, we've designed the documents to work with sites that have reactive moderation to ensure that the site admin isn't liable for defamation, slander, fraud by users, bullying, etc.

This is going way further than other forums with just a COPPA doc and a template privacy policy, we've looked at the risks a forum admin is exposed to and specifically are addressing those. We are protecting our customers, not just us. Though our ability to do this is limited, you can choose to apply your own legal terms and remove any protection our documents offer you.

On pagination, we've design it with infinite scroll in mind. All UX feedback to date has preferred pages so that is what we've gone with. We suspect that when we get to a native mobile app infinite scroll will be back.

I'm a vB user too, I run http://www.lfgss.com amongst others. The minimalism is by-design on Microcosm, users like their own expression but not necessarily that of others. Humans are great like that. We've chosen to keep the content clean, the conversations and events, but to allow a comment area on the profile page where literally anything can be inserted. So far, it's the best balance we've found for this, but it will be revisited when we have a wider diversity of interests covered by the forums we host... it will give us a better understanding of how people in different interest verticals want to express and distinguish themselves.

Events is just the first of the structured types of content that will be in a forum. We hope to make the other types as good as we've made our first-bash of the event type. Though we have to solve recurring events first.

Thanks for all the feedback, and let me know what you think about that first set of things re: service fees and our business model. It's definitely something that has raised questions, we know we are not the right product for the top few % of forums in the world, but we've received a lot of very enthusiastic feedback from mid-sized forums that have between 50 and 500 peak concurrent users that this is something they love about us.

vasuadiga• 12 years ago

How stable is the platform? Would you consider providing social login in future?

A couple of observations: 1) the double pop-up for posting a reply (right hand top) and Start a conversation is bad UX, IMHO. 2) the urls (of forums and conversations) aren't SEO friendly. Is it possible to change this?

buro910• 12 years ago

The platform is stable. Most of our investment to this point was in building a very solid foundation. We're using Postgres + S3 for storage and Go for the API. So our core is built on solid technologies that are well known and established, with only Go being a potentially risky bet as it is relatively young.

On your observations:

#1 Were you not signed in? Is this the sign-in popup? We don't use pop-ups anywhere except for the sign-in dialog that uses Persona. If this is the issue then it is one more thing to add to the now growing list of things we'd like to improve about how the Persona UX integrates with ours.

#2 We know that we will add more SEO oriented URLs, but this will require us doing it once and never changing how we do it. Which basically means that we want more content and to analyse that content to determine the most optimal strategy for building those URLs.

Google and others penalise harder for duplicate URLs reaching the same content than they reward for nice SEO friendly URLs. So when we do this, it will be done in a way that constructs a canonical SEO friendly URL for content and that is the one and only URL that will ever reach the content.

We need to get this right when we do it, because it will affect placement to make changes once it's done. We know that during the life of a forum content is moved, edited, and some content has liability in a title and we need to provide a way for that to change.

What I'm saying is that content is temporal and URLs are permanent. Whatever our strategy we need to strike the right balance here without making the UX weird for the end users.

In the meantime we are focusing our effort on ensuring that the HTML we produce is marked-up well, such that headers and titles are given due prominence, that we use schema.org microformats, etc. And we will soon add an API for sitemaps.xml files.

We'll help your content get indexed, we'll help you stay indexed, we'll help the unindexed content be discovered... but what we aren't going to do is rush in and create a potential fragility or weakness with the content that is already indexed.

Show HN: We built a platform for forums and called it Microcosm

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