Seeing Pauan's answer at http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15617 got me thinking that the Arc forum has several related problems, mostly because it uses the same software than Hacker News. So, here's a wishlist of things that a better Arc forum should have : Its own custom search : We all bemoan the loss of af.searchyc, and google search is a poor substitute. We need this, if only because we can't centralise information if we can't retrieve it. The ability to bump any threads : HN ranks stories according to their score and their age, and threads older than a certain threshold can no longer be answered to. The Arc forum doesn't have to behave the same way. It would probably be a good idea to be able to resurrect old threads.
Coupled with the custom search it would prevent needless creation of redundant threads (nobody likes having to read the same thing twice). Most forums I know are divided into subforums. It might be a good idea to use something slightly different here, perhaps a tagging system. Thus, it would be quick and easy to find all threads pertaining to Anarki, or the HTTP protocol. All of those ideas reflect the fact that HN is a news site, and as such, prioritise new content and throws old stuff away from the homepage.
A different design would suit the Arc forum better, and allow us to find the information we need more quickly and comfortably (These suggestions also reflect my own use of the Arc forum : I post very little, but I read it a lot and I search it constantly whenever I'm programming in Arc). Additionally, it would probably be nice to have more text formatting options. In particular, I think we obviously need Arc syntax highlighting. That being said, I'm not sure how we could solve these different problems. It would probably be possible to get the equivalent of HNsearch for the Arc forum, but the rest requires changes to the software.
Also, it would be complicated to move the community to a different site, since newcomers to Arc will come here first. What do you think ? |