What if we ran a news site on PhpBB?

News sites seem to fall into two main modes of organization. The most prevalent is the one you see at CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com, and my own employer. Conceptually, this layout more or less mirrors the front page of a print newspaper. OK, chances are everything on the front page is relatively recent, but it’s also the result of a conscious effort by editors to rank the news in order of importance. (The homepage of lenconnect.com, for instance, does display in reverse chronological order by default, but it only displays the stories for which we’ve checked the “homepage” box in our content management system, and we have the option of manually ranking stories as well.)

Then there’s the blog model, which can be seen on sites like AnnArbor.com and The Batavian. Stories run in reverse chronological order by default. Whenever you visit the site, you don’t see what its editors have decided you should see first — you automatically see whatever’s newest. (Although, again, this isn’t absolute — some things show up on the main page and some don’t.) For more, see Scott Karp, who’s a fan of the model, and the author of OnlineNewsDesign.com, who’s not so crazy about it.

I’m pretty much agnostic on this front; I figure both models have their ups and downs, and different consumers will have their own reasons for preferring one over the other. Which is why it’s probably a good idea, as plenty of sites do, to offer the news both ways — for example, for a conventional hierarchical having a “most recent posts” block in your sidebar for those who really want to know what’s new since the last time they checked.

But those aren’t the only ways of organizing content — so, back to the title of this post: What if we ran a news site on phpBB?

It wouldn’t have to be phpBB. It could be vBulletin, it could be UBB.Threads … whatever. Any software originally designed for discussion forums. Bulletin board sites can be broken down by category, but within the category — with the exception of pinned or stickied threads — the thread you see on top is the thread that’s been added to most recently. The thread at the top of the list might not be the newest thread, and it might not be the one with the most comments, but in general, the more interest a thread generates, the more time it will spend near the top of the list.

One big plus to this kind of format: If you want a platform that really emphasizes the importance of comments and reader participation, this would do it. First on a psychological front, since it’s a system that was built from the beginning for the purpose of creating discussion communities, and second because of what it emphasizes — not what we think is most important or what we added most recently, but rather what the community has been discussing the most.

I can also think of plenty of problems with using this presentation for news. For one, unlike a “Most Popular Items” list, it’s pretty easy for one person to game — if you’re a partisan who wants to keep an unflattering story about an opponent in the spotlight, all you have to do is go back every eight hours and bump the thread.

Honestly, I think this probably isn’t the best format for a news site. Certainly not as a default. But some systems already allow people to view a site either in a conventional newspaper.com layout or in a blog-style “river of news” layout … what if a site allowed users to choose a format mimicking a discussion forum as well?

If nothing else, it’s interesting to think about.

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