Forums are Not for Narratives

I think I have said before, I am not really a fan of forums. I do have a forum here, but you can see that I really do not use it in a manner of a traditional Internet forum. Mostly, I do not have enough people coming here to support having busy forums. I have had less than 100 visitors in the last week.

But I have been looking at forums quite a bit really. Myst Online's website. the DRC website. A co-worker's MxO website. And what do all these sites have in common? The majority of the content that brings people to these sites are in the forums.

I am not saying that forums do not have their place on the Internet. My problem is in how people are using forums to do very non-forum things. What do I mean by non-forum? Ever try to use a forum as the medium of communication for a IC story? How about for the posting of a tutorial or walk through or howto?

One of the issues I have with forums is that they make it very difficult to create a narrative. And they make it almost impossible to follow one.

How can anyone enforce a narrative flow using forums? Do you post a new topic for each “chapter?” Do you do introduce the narrative in the original topic and then post each part in comments? Do you take a mixed approach for each section? What happens when people start commenting on your thread and even start adding to the narrative, spinning it off in really weird ways? Ignore? Assimilate? Give up?

And how do you or your readers navigate the narrative once it is together?

One of the people at work has a website dedicated to his MxO faction, an IC group. They had originally been using phpBB to run their site. Like most groups they had content that just didn't fit in the forums. So they had a separate section and a page that launched either the static, hand-coded content or the forums. Myst and Uru Obsession sites run pretty much the same way.

But is this the best way?

Yes, the web allows for easy linking between resources under different domains of control, even between different hosts. But this makes for a somewhat fractured experience, even when one implements a solution that integrates the static and dynamic content under different domains of control into a single interface.

I convinced the coworker to look at Drupal and other software like it. I use Drupal here, and I am quite happy with what it has allowed me to do, after the original mix of MovableType and Blogger I was using. Is it perfect? No. Does it give provide all the features that a lot of people have gotten used to with various forum solutions? Not exactly. But isn't that the point?

Using the facilities in Drupal, a number of the more active IC posters on that site have started posting their IC content as Drupal books. There have been less comments on the book sections, but the stories are now told in a manner that makes a little more sense. There are still issues with this approach, but the site is growing, and learning its editorial workflow and how to most effectively use their main page.

I really do not like forums. I really prefer the 'River of News' style of presentation that I get from the 'View new posts' function at a forum. Most people seem to actually read sites that way, only resorting to reading the content via the forum interface when they have to catch up after a long time or are new to the forum.