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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.