On 11/27/2011 12:34 PM, Jimmy Cao wrote:
Why are online bulletin boards/forums attractive?
* The entire interface is designed for message board communication. You can
navigate easily as the interface organizes conversations into pages. For
example, you can just click on a link and you will find all the that you
yourself started.
* The interface allows you to permalink individual posts and share them.
* The capability to edit posts. This is extremely useful and a major
advantage.
* Sticky posts - Posts that are very important and should be locked at the
top so that they are easily accessible.
* Profiles - you can visit a person's profile to learn more about him. This
person can set his own avatar, his contact details, and even his website.
* Convenient and fully-featured searching - you can do a search even if you
are a new member of the forum. A good web interface or search engine on a
NG allows this, but not with the same capabilities.
* Post count (friendly competition and statistics)
* Better hierarchy of forums - you have forums and subforums.
* Private messaging. Sure, you can do this via email, but with a forum, you
have your own private message inbox for better organization and access.
* Easier moderation - I would imagine that admins can delete or move posts
much easier on a forum.
* Sometimes the interface will tell you if someone is online or not. You
can also see the amount of people who are viewing a subforum or a thread.
* Extensive formatting options - colors, graphic smilies, quotes, code
highlighting with GeSHi, etc. By the way, a while back I submitted an
updated D syntax highlighting guide to GeSHi, so eventually Wikipedia and
Wikibooks might highlight D2 fully, too.
Those are all desirable properties. But the forum software I've seen throws out
what's good about NNTP news forums:
1. Threaded view
2. Being able to mark messages as "read"
3. Being able to quickly scan read vs unread
BTW, most forum software is pretty much unreadable on small, mobile screens
because all the real estate is consumed by the borders, avatars, decorations,
gee-gaws, etc. Even text-only reddit blows on the small screen because the text
refuses to reflow.
