I've been thinking a bit about what I want the next version of the forums to be. It's surprising how interested I've been to revisit the app since I've been doing a lot of coding at work lately. We're starting to brew an update to PointBuzz, so I want to knock out a new version before we do that.
For years, I've insisted on not adding things to it that don't add value to the discussion. I've even been called names for my reluctance to add stuff in our suggestions forum. I think it's because other forums that I've actively used have annoyed me with extraneous buttons and elements that interrupt the flow of discussion. At one point I even considered ditching signatures and avatars, but relented and made it an option to turn them off. I also resisted keeping a bunch of crap about every user visible with every post. That would be redundant and distracting.
It's funny that I often look to vBulletin, a commercially available and popular forum, for ideas about what not to do. So much stuff on the screen. They've gotten better over the years, hiding a lot of stuff, but they still have minimum height posts and keep all of that user crap on there. Like anyone cares to see how many posts someone has, ten times on the same page?
Still, I also feel like it hasn't evolved enough. People are used to the relative fluidity of things like Facebook and Gmail. The problem is that there is a divergence in purpose there. Those services are not intended to be crawled or display ads the way that sites with forums typically are. I feel like I'm constantly at war with that. When I added "click for more posts" to add them into the existing page, I knew it was right for users, but I know from the data that it hurt ad views.
The coolest thing about building stuff for the Web these days is that there are so many great open source tools to create whatever you can think of. There are fewer constraints than ever. (Sidebar: these are also reasons that I despise the fascination with phone and tablet apps.) I rather enjoy being a part of the open source scene, however small.
I did add some easy, low hanging fruit things already. I built an activity feed using SignalR. You can just stare at it and watch that people are voting up and making posts. I think I'll see what else I can make real-timey. It's a good example of something that used to be harder because you'd have to roll your own code to do it.
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