I think most forum software (read: phpBB and vBulletin) sucks, and is stuck in a late-90s design rut.
It struck me that a lot of Quarter to Three’s forum problems are software problems.
What if we built a better forum mousetrap? Lest you think I’m full of shit, and admittedly I frequently am, I’ve done this before with Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. I’m no longer a part of that by choice, but we left a lot of stuff on the table by explicitly adopting the no-nonsense, high signal low noise Q&A format. I think I want to circle back around to pure forums and leave Q&A behind.
So let’s brainstorm a bit: what should next-gen forum software look like? Let’s start with some shared research and due diligence on what’s already out there, first.
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What forum software do you think currently works best – and why? Provide specific URLs with some rationale behind your choice.
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What are the essential features of forum software? What do you use every day?
Two errr three ideas I had:
a) What if certain trusted users – those that consistently produced quality content and were (somewhat) sane – could be democratically voted AUTOMATICALLY THROUGH SOFTWARE into the position of mini-moderators? Perhaps even on a subforum basis?
b) The disparate nature of voting (or favoriting/starring) on a forum, where you could be voting “up” on a post for dozens of wildly different reasons. Still, I think it’d be nice to come into a giant thread like this one and not have to read 50+ PAGES to find the 20 or so excellent posts absolutely buried in there. Surely there’s a way to escalate or highlight these excellent posts without wading through so much noise – and also preserving the rest of the thread in situ for posterity.
c) this would be more of an explicitly open-source thing from the beginning, aping the WordPress model. But written in node.js so it’ll be riding the leading edge of Atwood’s Law and not the hell on earth that is PHP.