If you can reference 5 year old forum posts why can't you reference 3 year old chat conversations?

Structured threads vs an unending ticker tape of noise.

Why can't you have threads in a chat app?

This article is really, "We couldn't adapt our processes to Slack, so we blamed the tool and replaced a chat app with processes, because we're special snowflakes and how could anything Not Invented Here apply to our totally unique problems of communication?"

Sure, they ended up with a series of other tools to cover their workflows, the thing they "invented" was how those tools work together to cover the gaps created by not actually having a comprehensive and well-configured chat app.

You can, but it's not the default; you need discipline and moderators to force people to thread conversations and structure their thread starters in such a way as to optimize for searching.

IMO just use forum software if you're going that way. Much more low volume, too (generally).

You don't need moderators, just policy. Where I work we have threaded conversations and no one needs to moderate anything.

Further, "optimize for searching" isn't a thing. Teams gives full text search, and you can find any word or phrase you need to instantly.

I think you're optimizing for familiarity.

Zulip has topics and it's absolutely amazing, but I still don't think it helps reference years old messages.

You can reference years old messages.

For example https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/3-backend/topic/Vagran...

I’m guessing the word “internal” has a lot to do with it.

Any recommendations for sensible forum software? (self-hosted would be ideal)

Great question, and I'm eager to hear the results. We're going to try creating a private subreddit to test the idea of forums for "long form discussions". I used vBulletin back around the early 00s, and I loved it, but I've found a number of people don't "get" forums. Discourse is something else I'd like to try.

I'm curious why people don't like forums for discussions.

Forums rarely get things right -- that had been solved by Usenet.

Proper threading.

Read/Unread tracking.

Keyboard UI. (And the mouse UI tends to be bad as well.)

Responsiveness. (Especially: page loads which are not instantaneous.)

Killfiles.

They generally have mediocre search functions unless they are entirely visible to Google.

These are off the top of my head.

Does usenet have points? That's what I find missing in most forums, except Reddit and HN, where best comments flow towards the top, instead of being present arbitrarily deep in the timeline.

Sorry, no native point system. You can bolt on something NoCeM-like, server or newsreader based, and enjoy distributing article reputation right now. But it supplies only a show/no show signal out of the box. I think the cancelmoose would have preferred it to be somehow more nuanced and only live in newsreaders...

http://home.httrack.net/~nocem/

https://www.systutorials.com/docs/linux/man/8-perl-nocem/

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/18172/cancelmoose

I actually prefer having the thread with the most recent post at the top (or bottom depending on how one sorts it) of the list. That, I find is helpful in terms of keep up to date with the most recent comments. The equivalent in HN would be that the next time you load HN's front page, this particular article would appear at the top of the list and this comment (along with other new comments) would be highlighted when you load the comments section.

Thunderbird does this by default. Reddit breaks threading when sorting by "new". On HN, you have to search the comments page "minutes ago" or "hours ago" to find new comments in an existing thread.

We tried to move from vBulletin over to Discourse but it didn't work out; in comparison, Discourse is very complicated and heavy weight. I want to like it, but it's just as snappy.

Instead, we went for XenForo, made by the original vB developers. It's got just enough modern technology to make it a bit more pleasant, and it's super fast (faster than vB 3). Migrating vB to that was easy enough too (took a while, but faster than Discourse which needed three days for the basic import and then still had a million tasks to run in the background)

We're working on something like subreddits - but just for your community - at https://threadbase.io

My company just started using XenForo, and we've been pretty happy with it. We're self-hosting on a cheap AWS Lightsail instance.

We really wanted to to like Dicourse, but everyone on my team found some little thing that really annoyed them ("why does it hijack ctrl-f?", etc.). It was death by a thousand cuts. XenForo is the most modern of the traditional forum platforms that I reviewed. Everyone just gets it.

Fossil is a source control system that has, among other things, a builtin forum.

I'm convinced that tight integration between source control, issue trackers, wiki pages, and forums is a good thing. Generally you can use URLs, but that's often cumbersome.

Discourse?

Second that. Discourse is fantastic, using other forum software feels terrible after it.

+1 for Discourse. It’s miles ahead of anything else.

Depending on what exactly you are trying to do, I've found wikis like Confluence pretty good for quite a few things.

It used to have a halfway decent forum addon, and the ability to have the wiki features/content embedded was enough to convince us not to try and use a separate forum.