Love Nextcloud - a discussion about Forum design,

As you see - love the new “drive” Nextcloud brought into the game. But…

You can call me an old man - but i hate this blog/category driven Forum design. I simply find it very uncomfortable and hard to read.
I like the normal Forum design which i know since don´t know when. By the way - to me one of the best selfmade Forum you can find here:

But i know - times are changing… I also know that i open this forum w a y much less often then the old one driven by phpBB i think… and that makes me sad in a way

Trends are changing… in functionality there are some advantages, however I can understand that the traditional designs often have a clearer structure. And it is easier to find topics without a search engine.

We probably won’t change the forum soon but if you have some ideas how to improve the current one, please don’t hesitate to share your ideas.

I also dislike this kind of forum.

It was not obvious to me how to get my preferred way of reading forums (“posts since last visit”). I’ve set “Consider topics new when” to “created since I was here last”. But I don’t know if it works correctly because in 99% when I open help.nextcloud.com “Latest” is displayed and I have the “New” link. The “New” links reads for example like “New (118)” and after clicking it it changes to for example “New (29)” and only 29 posts are shown. That’s very strange to me as I wonder where the problem is located: have there been 118 new posts or just 29.

Regards,
Andreas

You guys should probably move this discussion to https://meta.discourse.org/

@Zappa Please remove hyperlink to geizhals domain.

Why? Is there a problem with linking to it?

As forum form and functionality goes I much prefer discourse to the forums of old (phpBB, vbulletin, etc) which look old and dated. In time I imagine you’ll get used to it, and given how widely discourse is spreading you’ll likely have no choice in the not-too-distant future anyway.

I put this link in because in my opinion it has the best “old” design i ever saw - also better than phpBB… is it really a problem to show people ho a extremely intelligent and longtime self-developed forum-software could look like?

Links to commercial selling platforms are ads in my opinion. In our old forums (phpBB) we had lot of trouble/work with ad links. As soon as there are some it the spammers are comin`.

Nextcloud is open source and ad independant. For sure you can leave the domain name here.

The Forum is not really part of the selling platform - it was meant as a general discussion forum.
It was an example for a forum design which was made (about 17-19 years ago) by a nerd (the owner of Geizhals) for other nerds. It was made from scratch with lots of good ideas for efficient reading and discussion. I think its good that people also see how easy and efficient a Forum could be - besides modern design which does not go well with the “Form follows function” imperative i try to do my work;)

Fact to me as a longtime BBS/Newsgroup/Forum user is, that i will never get warm with the kind of Forum you here are using - so i will be here as infrequently as possible. And that makes me sad…

That’s unfortunately your choice to make. The community at large has embraced the forum so it can’t be that bad

Take a look in the modules and options available for this forum, perhaps we can easily implement improvements that make your visits more enjoyable.