

Ask HN: What makes for a good forum experience (software-wise, not content) - philjackson

My new site will have a 'built in' forum. It's going to be an important aspect of the site so I would like to get it spot on.<p>Which forums do you find a joy to use and are there any common features you dislike?<p>* The forums will be inhabited by computer gamers.
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hasenj
Minimum signup process (username & password, like HN)

No signatures

Maybe no avatars

No premature pagination (don't split threads to pages with 10 posts per page).
HN doesn't have any pagination inside a thread.

up/down votes.

No crappy wysiwyg editor; use markdown like stackoverflow.

Minimum or no category hierarchy. Use tags.

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user24
these are gamers. They'll want avatars of their favourite characters, and sig
lines with the time spent playing, hardware setup, etc.

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hasenj
Which would make the forum experience a bit annoying

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fragmede
Personally, I dislike seeing the number of views a thread has, as all that
shows is how attention-grabby the title is.

Quick-reply and notify by email are two features I find nice to have. Broken
search is another mis-feature that I'd be happy to never see again.

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smackfu
I need to be able to easily turn off all the other crap that people display,
like avatars and sigs.

A good way to follow the posts I commented on is crucial.

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tlack
\- Editable quoting (no cut and paste)

\- Decent bbcode, but nothing complex

\- Good search functions (in this thread, in this forum, on all forums, for
one user). Google Search sometimes gets it wrong and that can be very
frustrating.

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hasenj
I disagree. I can't see why any of that really matters.

bbcodes are more frustrating than useful, most people make mistakes while
trying to use them (forgetting to close a tag, specially when they nest tags,
e.g. url inside a color inside a quote)

What's wrong with copy/paste quoting?

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tlack
bbcode: So you'll let people enter HTML, or do you just not think anyone
should have to include an image on a forum ever?

quoting: Taking your thought further, what's wrong with retype quoting?

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rubinelli
Gamers are notoriously rowdy. You will need good moderation tools. Make it
easy to delegate administrative tasks to volunteers or paid helpers so you
don't become a bottleneck.

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giantsquid
You are definitely asking the wrong people.

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philjackson
I'm sure there's a HN/gamer overlap. Even if there weren't it doesn't mean
there won't be some useful ideas here.

