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

9 points by philjackson ↗ HN
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.

Which forums do you find a joy to use and are there any common features you dislike?

* The forums will be inhabited by computer gamers.

11 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 13.8 ms ] thread
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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

user24
these are gamers. They'll want avatars of their favourite characters, and sig lines with the time spent playing, hardware setup, etc.
hasenj
Which would make the forum experience a bit annoying
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.

giantsquid
You are definitely asking the wrong people.
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.
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.