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Help test out the new Pop Occulture Forums!



The forums associated with Pop Occulture have been a sort of fuzzy area for quite some time now. Which is too bad, because forums can be a great place for people to exchange ideas in a freer format than really makes sense on a blog. In any event, I discovered today that a stable version of bbPress, the php forum application by the makers of the awesome WordPress, is now available for download and install.

So I took this opportunity to set up the new revised version of PopOccultureForums.com using bbPress, because if it’s half as successful and pioneering as WordPress has been for blogs, then I think we’ll have a forum platform that we can use and improve on for years to come with my little network of sites.

Before this, I was using Lussumo’s Vanilla forum software, which was not bad, but I thought the architecture of the whole thing was a bit weird, and I didn’t like at all how it handled customization. I have, however, dumped the old files from that former install and am betting the farm on bbPress, and am excited and relieved to do so.

In any event, bbPress is only at a 0.72 version, rather than a full version 1.0, which means that there may still be a few bugs. So I would like to recruit the industrious and loquacious among you to help me test it out and make sure it’s ready for prime time. Go on over and sign up for an account, and post some thoughtful items in the 20 or so topically-oriented forums I have set up there. Also, don’t forget that you can add tags to your own (and I think other’s) posts, to help people better navigate to the conversations that interest them the most.

Thanks for your help and I’m looking forward to getting this going full steam!

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2 Reader Responses

  1. zacharius Says:
    October 15th, 2006 at 11:27 am

    on some level, i can’t help feeling like the message board concept is a bit dated. not for you, just in general.

    the successfull ones thrive on the basis of some shared culture. it’s a place to exchange social currency. look at the rigourous intuiton forum… it’s founded partly on jeff wells but mostly it’s a locus for a culture of raving paranoia.

    your post based conversations do well because they focus around a topic, and everyone knows the underlying foundation premise.

    with a forum you tend to have too many fragmented categories, and conversation started by people who you haven’t leared to trust. the whole point of your site is that it’s conversation that is started BY YOU. not that other pople don’t have valid opinions but everything is founded on the idea that your perspectives have value for your audience, not so much the subject matter. i know plenty of people online who talk the same stuff but i don’t trust them. they’ve either stupid, crazy or lazy in their thinking. you audeince has learned over time to trust your filter to have some value to them, and a fourm that’s open to everyone tends to dilute that, or depart from the core idea of your site, which is you.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 15th, 2006 at 2:18 pm

    Hm, wow that’s a cogent perspective. Never considered it like that but I definitely agree. I guess the point I see in the forums though is simply to give other people more of a voice. I don’t want to have to nix side conversations that sometimes develop on the site, so it would be nice to be able to push them off onto the forums, as well as provide a space for people to bring up points that are totally unrelated…



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