I am reading with great interest today about Discourse.
Discussion boards are indeed broken! They are archaic! It is insane!
The big litany of features on the homepage are just completely vanilla obvious good ideas that fast-forward boards from 1994 to now.
But there are a couple of GENIUS moves in there that EVERYONE should do.
This is one:
You can invite a user into the system, and the new user doesn’t have to create an account! They are your guest! Like in a member’s club or gym. Even better spin: what if you let ALL users “visit” a site without a user account and just kept them logged in if they came back (maybe rate limit new guest users per IP)? I mean, what’s the worst that could happen.
Another one:
The more you use the site, the more powers you have. That’s it. Be there and have powers. Post, read, reply, whatever. That is AWESOMMMME. #lazyweb moderation authority model.
And:
Links show how MUCH they have been clicked. Mosaic beta showed if a link had been clicked or not, literally nobody has built on that idea until this amazing feature. I love it. A click count. This one feature is an entire startup idea.
And finally:
You have markup and you have preview mode side by side! Every syntax editor ever needs this (hello WordPress).