Community === Forum?
Hey there! I'm building a tool for creating forums - Symposify. It's not ready yet, but just curious about how many % of communities need a forum? Or they want, but afraid of complexity?
Or maybe I'm missing something?
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We're more and more tempted to stop using Discourse as it's competing directly with our online video rendezvous but our situation is singular.
There seems to be a big split in community software nowadays; it's either chat-based (Slack), a traditional forum or a group on Facebook. All have their pro's and cons I guess but forums seem to work really well for bigger communities where repetitive questions and such become a big problem.
Out of curiosity: What specific problems have you seen around with existing forums that you want to solve?
So, if I will target for big enough slack communities, maybe they will consider my solution?
About problems with existing forums: classical forums are outdated, and any decent community project that I saw(including IH) developed their own software
To be honest I think Slack is not well-suited for most communities at all. But the simple fact that people are used to it for work helps a lot. It's just very low-friction.
Of course, there are clear issues such as important content fading away, hard to discover the most interesting discussions, etc.
Yes, same for Telegram. But I think chats and forum can co-exists, serius topics will be discussed on forum, and more casual talk - on chats
I think there is today a community, forum or group. They are usually the same only with a little different architecture. I think whatever you do you should approach it more Slack style or just much better. Something that I do not like about Telegram or the Facebook and WhatsApp groups is that they are very chaotic. However, that small change from slack or any of its imitations, allows you to have chaos on the right side, while on the left side you have order. The truth is that I am not a guru either, but I think a real opinion could help you more than a click on any of the options. Greetings.
Thanks for the reply!
Yeah, I agree, chaos in all that chats and groups is the main reason why I came up with this idea