Google Groups as a discussion forum

[Eric Chan]

As Jason mentioned, we're evaluating a couple of options for forum software at the moment. In order to do an apples to apples comparison, though, I need some help understanding all the foibles of Google Groups. As the other thread is steering towards discussing this place's mission statement and purpose, I thought I'd start a new thread for delving into technical details.

Here's how I see things right now, but please feel free to post your own pluses and minuses. No complaint is too small! If you're having any issues at all with these forums, or just have a niggling dislike of some quirk, please post it here.

+ I assume it's easy for new members to join community, provided they already have some sort of Google account. Forum registration the single biggest obstruction that prevents forum readers from becoming forum members.

- Of course, if you don't have a Google email address or account, I assume this actually problematic.

+ Clean design aesthetic, with a look and feel that emphasizes post content over fluff like signatures, avatars, etc.

+ When needing to contact someone on this group, direct email >>> private messaging system.

+/- Real names rather than typical forum aliases. Is this good or bad?

- It's difficult to quote posts and sections of posts. This is the biggest hangup.

- All the posts in a thread load at once, especially for people who aren't part of the group. No separation of threads into pages.

+ You could see this as a bonus. It forces people to join the group just to read and lurk, even if they have no intention of posting.

- Can't find this place if you don't know it exists. Ironically, for a product made by Google, it doesn't seem to index well in search engines.

- Tough to sort threads, and no options for subforums. Inhibitor to forum growth.

- Tiny avatars, which makes it difficult (for me!) to remember who posted what, and to associate "faces" and personalities with names.

[tomc...@gmail.com]

Going forward, the lack of subforums will become more and more of a problem. It will be very useful to be able to lump all the [SCD] discussions in one place, or the individual cube lists. It's fine now, but not for too much longer, I fear.

[Jason Waddell]

+ I view real names as a plus. If we move and we need to use a username, I will use "JasonWaddell" as my forum name. 

+ Really clean interface (important)

+ Easy for me to insert pictures from my computer into threads, but the formatting can be weird

+ The fact that there are no subforums makes this place at least feel populated while it's still small. Eventually that will become a minus. 

+ All our shit's here. 

- The long threads become increasingly unwieldy as the length increases. The loading takes longer, and it's harder to find things. I can't remember "there's a good post on Page X". 

- People have had trouble signing up in the past. FlowerSunRain's original sign up wouldn't let him post for some reason, and I had to send him a new request after he made a Gmail account. 

- When people reply to a thread by email it gets sent to my inbox. 

- Somebody once accidentally sent a post to my inbox instead of the group, and it took a while to realize that. 

- We don't get to have a cool URL for our forums here. 

+/- (I see no real benefit to forcing people to join to read and lurk. You could also argue it discourages lurking if they have to register)

- No subforums

[Nathan Weizenbaum]

You can adjust the group settings so that "reply" goes to the group email and not the individual's email, FYI.

On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 10:12 AM, Jason Waddell <jlwa...@gmail.com> wrote:

+ I view real names as a plus. If we move and we need to use a username, I will use "JasonWaddell" as my forum name. 

+ Really clean interface (important)

+ Easy for me to insert pictures from my computer into threads, but the formatting can be weird

+ The fact that there are no subforums makes this place at least feel populated while it's still small. Eventually that become a minus. 

+ All our shit's here. 

- The long threads become increasingly unwieldy as the length increases. The loading takes longer, and it's harder to find things. I can't remember "there's a good post on Page X". 

- People have had trouble signing up in the past. FlowerSunRain's original sign up wouldn't let him post for some reason, and I had to send him a new request after he made a Gmail account. 

- When people reply to a thread by email it gets sent to my inbox. 

- Somebody once accidentally sent a post to my inbox instead of the group, and it took a while to realize that. 

- We don't get to have a cool URL for our forums here. 

+/- (I see no real benefit to forcing people to join to read and lurk. You could also argue it discourages lurking if they have to register)

- No subforums

On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 6:41:22 PM UTC+2, Eric Chan wrote:

[Eric Chan]

Thanks, Nathan! I toggled that option on.

I'm a little red-faced right now. After complaining for a few weeks that Google Groups doesn't support sub-forums, it appears that they, in fact, do support them. They just call them categories. Huh. I'll leave that for Jason to play around with.

[Eric Chan]

Pagination! 2U, Sorcery. Divide long ass slow loading threads into bite size chunks.

Click on the drop down arrow under the thread title, then select Paged view.

Pages seems like they're 25 posts long. You'll know if it's working if you see the page counter in the top right.

[Vince Pinton]

I've had experience with both ZetaBoards and PhpBB in the past and both were great. Haven't played with any of those for about 3 or 4 years now, so I have no idea how easy they might be to use now. I know that both forum systems that I used were free of charge and contained pretty much every forum functionality you can imagine.

Maybe there is a way to connect through Google Accounts for any of those systems, but I haven't been able to find anything conclusive from the quick search I did (I know there are plugins for this, just don't know if they work properly or nicely). If there is a nice way to implement these, we could keep the real names around.

[Jason Waddell]

Ah! Paged view. I tried it and now my threads load even slower. It's like, it starts loading the whole thing, then decides "oh, I need to just load the last page" and then starts over. Not sure if others have this same experience. 

[Jason Waddell]

I temporarily enabled categories earlier, and it was a little obnoxious. Basically everything disappears from the front page instead of getting put into a "general" group, then you have to go back and assign all threads to a category. 

Then I tried tags and they were really buggy.