Just off the top of my head:
- Ability to sticky topics. DF is a hard game and a lot of common questions pop up. The ability to 'sticky' a thread to the top of each forum covering the appropriate FAQs for that section would cut down on a lot of useless posts asking the same, repetitive questions.
- Announcement of Private Messages. I got a PM the other day. And the only reason I found out about it is because on a lark I decided to click on the 'my profile' link. If I hadn't done that, I would never of found out about it.
- Easier forum moderation. As the game grows, we're going to get an influx of Asshats spamming the forum. Not only will moderation of the forum be easier, but it'd also be easier to organise and promote users to moderators as Toady sees fit. This means that we don't have to wait for Toady to purge the filth from the forum and keep the peace. And remember, asshats operate outside US time zones, so it can be days before Toady has the time and coincidence to do something.
- Create a better community. Users like feeling like they're a big part of something. We're missing out on a lot of features that helps bring people together - more detailed profile pages, ability to custom skin the forum,, avatars, user groups, list of birthdays, calanders for social events, basic galleries, polls. They're small things, but they still add to the whole. Something that makes us feel like we're as much a group of buddies outside the forum as we are inside it.
- User time zones. Not all of us are from America, but that's the time zone of this forum. Being able to set your local time would make browsing everything so much easier. A related note, more internationalisation. No forum will translate everything for you, but a lot of forums support many languages for a lot of common features, making it easier for users that aren't from an english-speaking background.
- Better security. The more popular we become, the more people will try to bring us down to get their rocks off. A forum built for the conditions of 2001 is horribly prone to attack, and I don't want to see this community brought to its knees by some script-kiddy.
- Better forum navigation. The ability to 'mark all posts as read' is something I've sorely missed on this forum. A new forum means a new layout that's faster and also more compatible with more modern browsers. And better searching, too.
- RSS Feeds. We have one now, but almost all modern forums have the ability to generate RSS feeds for every single thread. For RSS junkies like me, that's a godsend. I just subscribe to the thread about a mod that I'm interested in and I'm automatically updated whenever somebody posts in it. Helps keep up to date with interesting threads.
- Easy posting of news / announcements. Believe me, posting a news item would be infinitely faster and easier if we used a forum-based solution.
- Archives. Right now, if we don't want a thread to die, we just have to keep posting to delay the inevitable. It's a trivial thing to set up an archive forum where we send the best threads to grow better with age for new users to enjoy. And DF has a large storytelling aspect.
- Easier posting. Sure, we can quote and PM and everything like that now. But it's awkward. The icons are small and confusing. And no words alongside them - how are vision-impaired users and those with images turned off going to use them? New skins means cleaner, easier ways to do everything. Which means less hassles for everyone involved.
Anyone care to add more?
[ May 15, 2008: Message edited by: Dasleah ]
[ May 15, 2008: Message edited by: Dasleah ]
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Topic: Suggestion for the Forum (Read 4440 times)