Good UI/UX for Board-Blog interaction is CRUCIAL

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THE Feature of 2forum is the ability for posts on boards to refer back to posts on blog pages, so it needs to be as clean and frictionless as possible. Unlike blogs, feeds, and boards for which there are clear time-tested references, ie. twitter and imageboards, there is no clear precedent to take from here, which is a big issue since it's the feature that makes or breaks it.

I have objections to the way it is implemented right now. The ability to reply to blogposts with other blogposts was explained by Ryu Hayabasa to me with the posited situation of "a man that sees an article and wants to formulate an article as a reply to it." For this I'll take that idea of blog x blog interaction as canonical. You could formulate objections to giving facilities for that use with quote style embeding, but whether it is good idea or not is beside the point. The current design thinks you being able to link to another blogpost on your own blogpost implies that you need to have a fully decked out reply box for that purpose. This facility is shared with the mechanism with which you make a post that has a link to a blogpost on the boards. I think this combination of two different types of content is bad and will tend to confound people. It's especially bad that these blogposts-replying-to-blogposts are collated and presented in the way replies on threads are, and the box is positioned to seem like a thread reply.

My idea is that there should be one single, highly visible textbox on blogposts, a label which should say something like "talk about this on ___", upon pressing it, the post making interface (which should be homologeneous between all views) unfolds and you are able to write a post which is the posted to the board of your choosing.

The possibility of linking other people's blogposts on your own should be handled in some other menu, or perhaps if when viewing the blogpost via a button, far away and labeled clearly and distinctly from the one that makes blogpost-linked board posts.

Ideally, you wouldn't see blogposts and boardposts that link to the blogpost you're viewing on the same tab. They're completely separate types of content.

montagnard montagnard:37

"The possibility of linking other people's blogposts on your own should be handled in some other menu, or perhaps if when viewing the blogpost via a button, far away and labeled clearly and distinctly from the one that makes blogpost-linked board posts."

I disagree with this. The current system is as quick as possible once learned. Adding more menus turns things into CAD software like Solidworks and just bothers people who know how to use the site. Having a 'wizard' which requires multiple clicks to delineate where you're posting something will simply be annoying once a user understands how the reply widget (which is copied across the site, and thus consistent) works. Assuming users are stupid and obfuscating the UI is bad UI design.

"Ideally, you wouldn't see blogposts and boardposts that link to the blogpost you're viewing on the same tab. They're completely separate types of content."

I don't really agree. I assume this is in reference to the 'mentioned by' tab. Ultimately anywhere someone is quoting and embedding a userpost is a place where people are discussing the userpost, this is essentially quote tweeting, and the least frictioned way to do this is considering mentions as a general concept.

"It's especially bad that these blogposts-replying-to-blogposts are collated and presented in the way replies on threads are, and the box is positioned to seem like a thread reply."

It has been said before that we need to make these things as muxed as possible, and here you said we should make them more clearly distinct. More users would have to comment to see if people agree or disagree with me.

on the subject of UI, I think things should be 'powerful', people lionize Vim and The Bloomberg Terminal because they're cool.

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