HTLAL vs LLORG

[Tristano]

In the recent thread about what makes a good log, someone mentioned that they preferred not to have personal details and another person did. But the comments got me thinking about the differences there might be between this forum and the old HTLAL. Do you think LLORG is less formal, and less about language learning than community? Or are they both about the same? I also saw a post recently about other forums where a user was doing more "point/counterpoint" type debating, which we don't really do. I believe there was a desire on the old HTLAL to foster a more academic style of posting. I feel HTLAL seemed to have a lot more information about scientific and linguistical research, but that could just be my perception. What are yours?

Let's start from the name.
"How to learn any language" vs "A language learners' forum".
It says that whether the other forum was about the process, this is more about the journey.

[Serpent]

The former was inspired by a book, the latter was chosen to be short and to the point, without the many dashes
The former was intended to be a language learning site with a forum attached to it, the latter is a forum with some extra content.

[Tristano]

So it is physiological that although similar they are different.
And I like it this way I'm not a fan of formal environments, so this is a better home for me and for learners like me.
I don't feel the need to change it, although looks like scientific articles and conversations arise nonetheless, which is also positive.

[Dylan95]

I like both forums a lot. I was a regular lurker on HTLAL for at least several years, but I never felt worthy of putting in my two cents. I was pretty intimidated to ask questions there as well. That is not the case here. I'm not sure if that's a result of the forum, an increase in my own confidence, a result of my slowly increasing experience as a language learner, or a combination of these explanations. Either way, it suggests something positive about LLORG (at least for less experienced language learners like me).

I think all of the experiments and challenges at HTLAL were really cool. Back when I was a regular lurker there, people posted more frequently as well. I also liked all the resources they had to offer outside of the forum. The main downsides to HTLAL were that you had to pay to access all the features and the site was very clunky. Very frequently it didn't even load.

Overall, I love both forums, and I'm very glad this forum was created, because HTLAL has become a ghost town!

[rdearman]

OK, Let me embed another question in this thread. What could be done to make LLORG better?

[emk]

OK, Let me embed another question in this thread. What could be done to make LLORG better?

I would really love to see more of the "top posts" get turned into posts on the the blog.

One significant bottleneck here is that I need to personally get off my backside and actually add a nice theme to the blog. And then I need to add links from the forum header to the blog, so we remember it exists.

But if anybody wants to write posts, it's relatively easy. Basically, posts are written with Markdown (sort of like BBcode, but just different enough to be annoying), and then we need to add them to GitHub, which people can help you do. Then they show up automatically.

So many things to do, so little time... (And I want to read another French book, and start doing L/R with Spanish, and somehow make progress on substudy. Sigh.)

[iguanamon]

HTLAL proffered itself as a one-stop language shop. The HTLAL "static" site was what lured people into the forum. It had a bit about a lot of self language-learning, from Mezzofanti to basic language-learning faq's, language profiles, tips and tricks, famous polyglots, etc, and served as an introduction to "you can do this!" self language-learning.

We have a lot of that covered with the wiki. Why re-invent the wheel. It's difficult to find "the blog" because we don't feature it here. Let's take "the blog" and incorporate either a link to it or a dedicated space for it here and also a link to the wiki. Obviously, an all volunteer effort is difficult to pull off, but since we already have most of the parts in different places, really, all we need to do is make the parts accessible and easy to find in one spot, preferably from here. "If you build it, they will come". Then, with the links (or area's) visible to people, I'll bet that more people will contribute work to flesh it out. As it is now, probably most members here probably don't even know what we are talking about when we mention the "LLORG static site". I agree that a "Best of LLORG" section would be a nice addition to have, but someone would have to curate it.

[Cainntear]

Obviously, an all volunteer effort is difficult to pull off, but since we already have most of the parts in different places, really, all we need to do is make the parts accessible and easy to find in one spot, preferably from here.

...and once again, we hit the single biggest design flaw in phpBB, the most powerful and popular free open-source forum software in the world -- you can't actually link to your main site from within it.

It's an utterly insane state of affairs, but sadly that's how it is.

[Cainntear]

What I'm surprised on this discussion is that although it was hinted at, it really wasn't mentioned. What killed htlal , aside from terrible management, was Facebook.

Facebook has slowly pulled the user-base away from all forums - before one could have forums for specific activity but now that audience finds it easier to go to a single place and join a group (open or closed) that caters to those interests. The forums that survive are those that provide services beyond community, conversation and social feedback.

The value of any place is actually having the critical mass of interactions.

You're absolutely right, and I find Facebook groups maddeningly useless for seriously language learning discussions. Facebook is all about "recency" in communications, so it's really difficult to just call up an old discussion if a new user asks a question that has been asked before. This means that any language groups I've been in are boringly repetitive, answering the same old beginner questions time and again, and watching clueless beginners give totally incorrect responses to pretty simple queries.

Facebook is evil. Kill it with fire.

[emk]

...and once again, we hit the single biggest design flaw in phpBB, the most powerful and popular free open-source forum software in the world -- you can't actually link to your main site from within it.

Actually, we have a custom header links extension contributed by t123 (thank you so much!) which you can find here. This provides the "New Messages" and "Active Subjects" links at the bottom of the header bar, as seen on the desktop. It can be trivially modified to "Blog" and "Wiki" links. The tricky part is setting up the localization so that it can be translated like everything else.

The only reason this wasn't done a year ago is that I'm shamefully lazy, and I've been procrastinating instead of figuring out how phpBB localization works.