Opinions on Forum Design

[Anaryu]

First, these are my opinions, take them with a grain of salt and take what you can while realizing they are not demands.


1. Creativity Should Be Rewarded

If a user is good at visual design, the site should let them reflect it in not just their work, but their presentation. Same with good writers, programmers, scripters, etc.


2. Power to the Users

Erk's points on this are excellent, so I will not reiterate much:
The more power users have to modify their OWN content (not others) the less administration will be necessary. Jerks will drive people away from them instead of become "victims" and put the admins in a stressful situation.


3. There is No Universal Categorization

No matter what forums we design, it will never be enough to cover what people want to show.

What if someone wants to show a graphic novel or a comic? Is that a story or a visual? What if it's an animated short? Story? Visual? Sound and Music? Programming?! What if it's an RMXP game?

The design should allow for users to LINK this resource to all the forums they feel it belongs in without having to copy the contents so they can gather appropriate feedback.


Design Layout:

Now, the Design Suggestion:

Users should have a centralized and fully controllable and personal "page" like Deviant art has. Here they should be able to post and design pages for whatever they want to post up, a new piece of art, a game project, a new song, or a short story or story idea.

These posted "designs" should be fully customizable, easy to work with and link, and let the user customize how they present it.

Feedback forums should have the option to allow users to easily link them to the resource in question, so they could post "Here's a new song I've worked on, I did this and that, and would like to know why if it sounds nice or not." and then link to the customized page under their "portal."


SPONGEN.COM
Main Forums
Posts
Posts with Links to Design Entry Page
User Design Pages
Design Entry

And there's my one and a half cents.

[Erk]

more later but short: I like 3. a lot! I will add to my Open-Sourcing the Forum thread the idea of linking threads to multiple appropriate forums.

[psgels]

I'm with Erk here, and how about the favourites-option that DeviantArt has? Like, users can select projects from others that they're impressed with, and feature it on their own personal pages.

[Erk]

OK, trying to tackle this now.
1. Creativity Should Be Rewarded
How do you mean by allowing them to affect presentation? More bbcode layout tags? Or actual thread customisation options? It would be pretty neat to be able to specify aspects of a thread's skinning.

2. Power to the Users
I am really glad you agree on this one. I think it is one of the cornerstones.

3. There is No Universal Categorization
besides what I already said above, I think this is another vital point. a lot of us have come from an RMXP background and have troubles not thinking in terms of "projects" and "resources". That is not a very useful pattern of thinking for most design.

Design Layout:

Users should have a centralized and fully controllable and personal "page" like Deviant art has. Here they should be able to post and design pages for whatever they want to post up, a new piece of art, a game project, a new song, or a short story or story idea.With the "child thread" system I described here (http://spongen.org/showthread.php?t=17), a parent thread would work great for this. What if a user could specify in his User Options a specific thread as a "home" thread? It would be linked in the postbit and on the user profile and stuff, or maybe even become integrated with the user profile somehow. Combined with the idea of custom-skinning threads in (1) that would accomplish your goal.
-thought- custom skinning all threads would be a hassle though. I wonder if it might limit processing a bit to allow each user to specify 1 custom skin for all his/her threads. Or just for his/her "home thread".

This is not quite the same as what you are suggesting, but it is more in-line with a current forum. Your idea is bigger, and it might be a better idea in the long run. I'm not sure which would be easier to integrate.

[ccoa]

Following from the blatent copying from devart, it would be nice to be able to "watch" a member and be notified if they create a new thread in a specified forum or forums or add new content to their user "page," if they have one.

Not really useful for a small forum, but once a forum becomes very active, it's hard to keep up.

[Mac]

Yeah that would be better, subscribing to a user rather then subscribing to a specific post.

I love the idea of giving people their own page like deviant art, but it was pretty much the same thing i was working on for mactopia before the forum shift....but basically it can be seen as more of a professional CV of their work...of which they can showcase and its a good opportunity to get recognised.

[Anaryu]

1. Creativity Should Be Rewarded
I was thinking more like if we have a landing or personal page for them it should be something they can customize pretty heavily, perhaps there would be sections of their own development page, a column on the right and attachable "posts" on the left that they could move around or customize the look of, potentially even changing the theme of the page to one they choose or make with it's own images or what-not (perhaps a bit extreme).


I guess overall I saw a custom user page as:

1 ounce Profile Page
2 cups of Weblog
1 teaspoon of customizable design
Mix and heat to 250 degrees for 30 minutes, best served fresh.


I guess if I had to reference something it would really be Deviant Art's design for users, it's hard to argue with the success and love people have for the layout and design.

[Erk]

Custom user pages are an interesting idea, I do agree. I wonder if we could set something up similar to zoints local, but much smaller in scope: just a second user profile page with more customisation. I dunno though, those kinda things tend to be massive server drains if they get carried away. That is why big sites tend to only allow colour selection choices, and often limited ones at that.

[Cocoa]

I like the idea of a profile page, perhaps with a code-snippet system and/or a gallery system as well? I'm sure a few of us here are artists.

[psgels]

I think Anaryu worded it well with the teaspoon. A bit of customization is okay, but I don't think that many people would use it.

[Atemu]

I personally would go all out with customization, but that's just me. y!Gallery allows that for users; here's my main gallery page (http://yaoi.y-gallery.net/user/skyladoragono/) (small nws warning; my profile image has a nakie Yuugi-puff) to give you an idea. The way it's set up, is you see your custom work on every page you go to, except when you go to another person's gallery that has a custom layout.

I can see how such a feature would get abused on here though, especially after we get more members. :x

[Erk]

Allowing users to link buttons etc. to images hosted off-site (photobucket or personal ftp space), and allowing users to specify colours and a few other functions like column width in CSS, would be possible without bogging things down too much, since I think each user's page would not get queried often enough to hit the server too hard.

This is all pretty long term, though.