PhpBB quick reply mod

[Mike Panic]

This is, imho, an essential mod to phpBB and I think once implemented, every user will greatly appreciate it.

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=287126

[HB]

The phpBB developer's excluded it from the base because they feel it encourages one liner "IM chat" like responses. I see their point and would not want to encourage this posting style.

[Mike Panic]

I'll beg to differ - Next month it will be 5 years that I've had http://www.iphotoforum.com online, running phpBB and this mod has been installed since nearly the start. It has greatly helped the user experience and increased the number of replies, it's one less thing for an end user to click on before being able to make a post.

[HB]

Nice forum, but I clicked on 20+ topics and it was hard to find a post that was more than two sentences. It may reflect the nature of your forum, or your use of "quick reply" supports the phpBB's developers' assertion that it encourages one liners.

[Mike Panic]

Nice forum, but I clicked on 20+ topics and it was hard to find a post that was more than two sentences. It may reflect the nature of your forum, or your use of "quick reply" supports the phpBB's developers' assertion that it encourages one liners.

Your site, I'm not trying to get into a pissin' match... just stating my experience running a forum for 5 years and actively taking part in forums for the last 10 years or so. If you take a minute and back-up from what a developers' point of view is and take a look from the end user experience you may see things differently.

Regarding my forum - you are probably correct - I had a serious spam-bot problem for more than a year that was almost impossible to curb and lost a lot of loyal posters - but the demographic and overall type of forum is very different - my forum is mostly teen through middle 20's people - looking for feedback on photos and gear reviews.. this one consists of what I can only assume to be mid 20's - mid 50's people who tend to be longer-winded by nature and discussing tangible objects, not digital images.

If the sole reason is to avoid one-line replies, that is your call - your forum... I just personally think as a user that (and web developer) that making it as easy as possible for a user to leave a comment yields in faster replies, more replies and overall more user-friendliness. Being that this site is monetized, perhaps forcing users to click Post Reply is partly due to the fact that your page views increases, exposing more ads leading to more pages being ranked in Google because of longer times spent on each page and more drill-down.

In any event, its just a suggestion based on my experience running a forum and using forums.

[HB]

If the sole reason is to avoid one-line replies, that is your call - your forum... I just personally think as a user that (and web developer) that making it as easy as possible for a user to leave a comment yields in faster replies, more replies and overall more user-friendliness.

It really does come down to discouraging one-liners. Minor usability changes do have an impact on how people post. For example, this forum uses URLs with injected topic titles. This makes the URLs more readable, but indirectly discourages posters from using the even easier to read [url]some meaningful text[/url] markup. I figured this would happen, but thought it was a worthwhile tradeoff.

As noted in the Guidelines for productive discussion, one of the site's goals is to "raise the discussion level." If having to click once discourages some posters, that's fine by me if the overall result is a lower noise to data ratio.