is FB a forum buster ??

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Willy Fisterbottom
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Post by Willy Fisterbottom » Mon Sep 01, 2014 7:25 am

Loading photos is what is stopping me from having lots of threads going on here. Other than my tablet and phone I don't have internet at home, thats why I have much more pics and stories on FB as it's easy as click and share.

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AndrewT
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Post by AndrewT » Mon Sep 01, 2014 12:16 pm

Use imgur.com
Cant get any simpler - it has an app for 1 click uploads and automatically provides a link to paste into forums so they display properly.

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Talasas
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Post by Talasas » Mon Sep 15, 2014 5:33 pm

I used to live in car forums all the time, I was one of those people with several thousand posts and while I made quite an effort to contribute I'm sure only 1% of what I posted was truly helping further the cause. This was 10 years ago and there was no alternative at the time. Since then, life took priority and logging car projects took a back seat (no pun intended), this among many other forum people doing the same resulted in the forum feeling like it was dying out.

The difference with Facebook now is that it can seem a threat simply because of the sheer audience but forums and Facebook need not compete. Here's my 2c essay on the advantages and disadvantages of FB over forums:

Advantages of Facebook over Forums
  • Reach - This one's a no-brainer. The target audience of Facebook is everyone. It's effectively a topic-less forum, about life, our lives and humans are inherently vain. Because participation is not just limited to one topic everyone is already connected and can find groups of like minded people quickly. Information is put in front of you instead of you having to seek out the information.
  • Single Sign-In - This follows on from the above, people create one account to create a presence and simply subscribe to groups that interest then. Adding and removing groups is extremely easy. Compare this to being interested in several types of car: For every make, interest group, model, geographic location, you might need to create a new user account and keeping track of all those logins, usernames and such becomes a cumbersome process.
  • Push Notification - This is a big one, people have their phones with them virtually everywhere they go and many will likely have the Facebook app installed. When there's activity in a group a person is subscribed to, they will know about it almost immediately and have a instant gateway back into the group. This is much more likely to bring a user back compared to the "thread subscription" on forums where the user gets an email and only to threads they choose to subscribe to. The differences here are subtle but important.
  • Usability - This is the one that's bothered me for years and only gets worse with time. It seems almost every forum framework uses the same priciples from the early 2000's with no change. Here's an example, have you noticed how every forum has the same tiny numbers to jump pages in the bottom right? Surely such a frequently used feature would be more prominent, AUSubaru is one of the few I've seen that have it at the top of the page too which is rare). I mentioned above that people carry their phones with them, well smartphone usage is increasing dramatically to the point where it's set to overtake desktop usage. I've never seen a forum that's done mobile really well. I've seen good but never excellent (I'm ignoring Tapatalk here because end users need to pay for that crap and it also isn't brilliant).
  • Easy Image Hosting - Mentioned earlier in this thread, this is a big advantage again.
  • Friendlier Atmosphere - I hate to say it but in my experience it's true. People might post a little troll here of there but overall your replies to seeming stupid questions will be met with an answer. I compare this to the many forums I've been to where people ride around on their high horses laying into every newbie who struggles to use the terrible search features that plague every forum.
Okay so what doesn't Facebook do so well?

Disadvantages of Facebook over Forums
  • Spam/Advertising - Facebook leverages advertising heavily, especially since December 2013 and this has created tremendous contention for your wall posts. This means your wall will contain lots of content you may not want, whether you like it or not.
  • No Threads - Well, sort of. Each post in a group is effectively threaded if people reply to it but the threads are ordered by time and you can't sort them any other way. Finding something once it's buried down the bottom of a group wall is not easy to do. This leads to:
  • No Search - A huge problem with Facebook. There is no native search feature whatsoever. The only solution is to make sure you like a post so you can dig it out of your activity log which is also sorted by date. I see Google offers a search for walls but I haven't used it and it would likely be limited to what is public making it useless for Closed Groups.
  • Low Quality Information - Combine a much wider audience, mobile devices, short attention spans and glorofied trolling and you've got a recipe for infomation that might be worse than taking a hammer to your car while blindfolded. Sadly forums aren't always better (think how many times you've seen a post containing the words "I've heard").

Man, this is getting long quick, I could go on but I think I'll just stop there and anyone interested can discuss if they wish.

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dfoyl
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Post by dfoyl » Tue Sep 16, 2014 7:21 pm

20 years ago, we used newsgroups. Forums like this didn't exist, or were created from a background in newsgroups. The good thing was they were structured so you could drill down to specifics (Subaru, Old Gen, EA81, Brumby) or stay high-level. The bad thing was the way classifications were set up initially meant they couldn't evolve.
I can see discrete forums going the same way - used by a handful of people - with the next generation on to Facebook or even another kind of worldwide database of knowledge (Wikipedia is one that could certainly evolve in that direction)
The power of Facebook is people to people transactions. Why deal with eBay 10% fees when you can buy and sell direct to a even bigger market ? The only value add eBay has is buyer protection, and that is so heavily skewed in the buyers favour that sellers are pulling out of eBay (plus the fees, of course). Recent example which worked out for me but killed the seller was I bought a $600 US item, had it shipped to a US friend and it was switched out with a counterfeit item (completely different item but same generic product). eBay found in my favour and gave me $600 back AND paid my return postage. I could easily have received the correct item, claimed I received a $5 part, and then gotten my money back PLUS the item I bought.
I certainly wouldn't be buying eBay shares. They are already heading to being an alternative to Alibaba (virtual storefront), and with Alibaba being floated this week and having the strength in Asia that eBay definitely does not have, I can't see eBay remaining dominant or even relevant.
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Contact me for reproduction XT6 hubs...and EA82 rear discs.

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sublime
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Post by sublime » Tue Sep 16, 2014 10:52 pm

Interesting opinions! Certainly smaller forums that have small memberships may suffer because of Facebook but I do not see larger ones such as The Samba or even USMB being equally affected. Their size and sheer volume of information means people will continue to use them.
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AndrewT
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Post by AndrewT » Thu Sep 18, 2014 12:58 pm

I wonder if this has merit.
What if the Ausubaru public Facebook group posts could appear on the forum as a live feed? They could be duplicated to the forum in a "Facebook feed" section which would be better than Facebook in that it would be easily searchable. Perhaps there could be some way to categorize posts too, so they drop into the appropriate forum section as a new thread, with all followup posts appearing there too (although a busy moderator would probably have to classify posts...unless it had built in smarts to pick up on key words and auto-classify). People could reply the post using Facebook like normal, or even reply using the Forum and the post would be added to the Facebook post so people just on Facebook could see it too.

Ultimately it would be great if the Forum could allow users to set up single sign-in so they just log in with their Facebook details (many websites do this). The forum-only accounts could also still exist for those of us who do not use Facebook.

This way the Facebook-only users would be happy, not much of a change, but it would be easier for them to go check out the Forum as they don't need to create a separate account.

The Forum users would also have the benefit of not missing out on many of the quite useful or interesting posts people put on the Facebook group.

It would need a fairly serious developer to embed this in the Forum and work out single sign-in I think, probably quite a revamp.

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