Are there plans to update the Zotero forums?

v4u6h4n

I really love Zotero, and I really love research, and I really want to be more active on the forums, but I find it a bit hard to get involved the way everything is designed compared to more modern forums with sections, etc.

Are there any plans to upgrade the forums design? Something like Discourse, for example, would be a major improvement.

aborel

I don't know if an update is planned, but for what it's worth: the forum used to have sections, they were explicitly abolished some years ago because they caused significant confusion/duplication.

v4u6h4n

Sections is only one of the things that I think would help, for example even basic features like being able to order forum search results by number of posts, etc would be great. A lot of features are very simplistic and just really make participation unnecessarily laborious.

adamsmith

I know that Zotero devs (and in particular dstillman) really don't like Discourse -- it'd otherwise be fairly simple to just move stuff there. The simplicity of the vanilla (yes, that really is the software) forums is part of what they like about it (I don't have much of an opinion either way -- this works for me, but so would many other options).

v4u6h4n

Funnily enough I'm actually with dstillman; I don't really like Discrouse either after having used it alot on the KDE forums. It's a bit too opinionated for my liking; I prefer something that has a more traditional design. Buut I also prefer something that has plenty of useful features, which Discourse at least does have.

iagogv

Let me suggest phpBB as an alternative to Discourse. Other alternatives here

v4u6h4n

Ah yeah I've been on plenty of forums using phpBB, its old school looking, in a satisfying way.

iagogv

Other good forum engine, which I believe would fit well for Zotero is Bugzilla. I know, it is more about Zotero development than about support, but maybe is where Zotero developers should be present. So, what I imagine is:
1. Bugzilla replacing zotero-dev mailing list and a big part of these forums discussions about bugs/issues and feature requests. It would be open, but moderated to satisfy certain guidelines such as https://www.zotero.org/support/forum_guidelines and the kind of discussions allowed (issues, requests...)
2. For support, help and so on, it is the community. An alternative in between Discourse and Reddit is Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org/), which is a decentralised forums platform (with a Lemmy account in any Lemmy forums, you could participate in any other Lemmy forums servers [https://join-lemmy.org/instances]). If Zotero developers do not like, users wouldn't expect they should be present. It wouldn't be moderated, or it could be, but much less restrictive that currently is. It would be open to other discussions too, more open/generic than here, e.g about research/academy topics, papers/items...