I’ve been thinking about how better to visualize discussions in a web browser. It seems like we never really made it past threads. There have been incremental improvements to them over the years. One site has done this better than any I’ve seen yet. I am quite impressed with the Lugnet discussion forums. For those of you that have participated in Usenet I think you’ll find the fact that you can connect to all these discussions with your news reader as easily as your web browser to be technically impressive.
I wrote down some notes about this particular page.
My Notes…
Lugnet Messages [View]
All messages have a header like the above. It gives you context for where you are in the forums as well as the message thread. If you need more detailed navigation information then thread details are at the bottom of the page. On the right are lists of recently active threads if you are a regular visitor to the site and just want to read what’s been updated recently.
Current Forum and Message Navigation
Message Header
This is one of the masterstrokes of the system. As you can tell from these message headers they are built on top of the RFC 2076 standard. The message system is futureproof since it can evolve as standards evolve. Also it can build on the already large body of knowledge for how best to handle online discussions. Although cropped from the picture a reply button, and raw header link are on the right side and readily available. If only the multitude of comment/message board systems out there had this foresight it would be so much easier to move discussions between them.
Message Body
When composing messages the system has it’s own markup language. I have mixed feelings about this. I think it’s great that lugnet messages have special markup for Lego fans. It helps them get their ideas across in a much clearer way. What disappoints me is that it doesn’t follow the standards for markup created by HTML and XML. You sprinkle regular characters like *, -, < and > throughout your message to get things like lists, links and various other text decorations. Why not just use the existing HTML markup for this?
On the other hand I think the LDraw extension is incredibly clever. LDraw provides a standard library of lego block images for embedding in your posts. Another clever feature when composing messages is “transclusion.” Proving that he’s smarter than the average geek Todd, the developer, quotes Nelson from the Xanadu project. Where inclusion includes a copy of the article transclusion includes a reference to the article. In both cases the article is embedded in the new item, but a transcluded one will continue to update as the original updates.
Message Respones
After the message body is the list of message responses. This isn’t a whole thread, just the messages immediately following this one. They are sorted by date, but can be easily scanned by author. It also includes a summarization of the message response to help you gauge if you should click through to read it.
Thread Navigation
Lugnet Messages [Backend]
This is one of the more impressive aspects to the Lugnet news section. It’s not a completely new invention. They built their discussion forums on existing Internet standards for discussions, NNTP and Usenet headers. I can’t imagine the web based news reader is reading from NNTP in real time. If so it’s incredibly fast and smooth. I imagine it’s more likely that the news server uses some kind of gateway to communicate with the web server. That implies that it’s using some sort of intermediate message store outside of the news server though.
