Excellent Joel Spolsky article about the design decisions to build the Fog Creek tech support forum.
\nhttp:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/articles\/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html
\nHe talks about small touches designed to improve the conversation and the social space:
\n* a simple design to eliminate impediments to posting. “That’s why there’s no registration and there are literally no features, so there’s nothing to learn.”
\n* no feature to “email replies to post” — that kills discussion, since users never check back
\n* no branching, since branching makes discussions confusing
\n* topics listed based on time of original post– drives a life cycle for conversations
\n* need to scroll through all the posts before you respond –means users are more likely to respond in context
\n* no “preview mode” — means users are more likely to be careful before posting
\n* “reply” doesn’t quote previous post — reduces redundancy
\n* human moderation — need to remove troublemakers, much less socially and technical complicated than Slashdot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Excellent Joel Spolsky article about the design decisions to build the Fog Creek tech support forum. http:\/\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/articles\/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html He talks about small touches designed to improve the conversation and the social space: * a simple design to eliminate impediments to posting. “That’s why there’s no registration and there are literally no features, so there’s nothing to … Continue reading “Building communities with software”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-4n","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}