http://www.popsyndicate.com/column/story/why_forums_suck
Five worst forum features
Enough about that, let’s boil down this info and add some new stuff too. These are features or aspects I think hold back the user experience. In an effort to compete with each other, forum companies have rolled out completely unnecessary or poorly executed functions that ultimately do more bad than good.
5. The Inner Forum
There has got to be a better way of wrestling all your data into an organized fashion than blocking off topics and stacking them on each other. It has a hierarchy to it, but it is complete unintuitive to the casual reader. Chances are that each forum site already specializes in a particular subject anyway. Breaking it down subcategories and having to click through three or four different pages is completely unnecessary. There are already better ways of displaying relevant content. Instead of organizing topics by subject, a more logical approach could be to display the threads according by creation date. Then, associate the subjects to the threads and not the other way around.
4. You can quote me
Forum discussion threads can get quite long. Since a single thread can involve multiple conversations displayed as one long series of replies that paginate into the double digits, users try to add some clarity to their replies by quoting previous replies in their responses. This method barely works in email. Threads are already over crowded with information as it is without having re-read everyone else’s posts just to get to new content. Some forums have gotten around this problem by indenting their replies or “nesting” them. Apple’s Discussion uses heavily-modified forum software to pull this off rather well. MySQL also indents as does Slashdot, Scoop, LiveJournal and Aterr. That isn’t to say indenting replies is the only method out there for handling long threads. Managing tree data can be a tricky method and there are only a few articles that explain this to developers. Digg.com does a hybrid of one indent only.
3. Ranking members
Congratulations! You’ve posted 5,000 comments within 2 years. You have earned terrific kudos from your peers and have achieved “guru” status. Too bad you are not getting paid for any of it. It’s one thing to be active in an online community to the point that you have a vested emotional interest in it, but don’t get too carried away. With the exception of Gaia Online, there isn’t any reward for being the resident expert. My advice for those who whose posts and comments now have commas in their numbers: stop, take a break, you don’t need to put your two cents into everyone else’s reply, chances are that they already know where you stand. If you have that much to say, you might be better off writing your own column or your own blog. Certainly a person with that many comments has something interesting enough to be worth reading.
2. TMI
Like listed in number five, getting to actual content is a chore. After several clicks of navigating to the latest post or thread discussion, the page is cluttered with more information than you possibly needed to begin with. The typical full featured forum will show you the thread, but it also displays site tools and links, and then your info plus more private message count, and all of the users involved in the thread (including their avatar, join date, location, title, number of posts they’ve made since they joined, their status level, IM handles, signature), a time stamp, reply number, a quote button, reply button, report button, and the actual time the page loaded. Where is the content?
1. The ****wad Theory*
*see above image
Tying it all together, from too many buttons to zealous users dominating discussions can be melted into one big “****wad” of a problem (I’ll just call it “problem” for now on). Forums have evolved into a sub-culture where communities can form over great distances and anyone with access to a server can make their own global village. But with every village, there is an idiot. It’s inevitable. Invent any new tool and someone will ruin it for everyone else. Right now, forums have easily set it up for users with a return key to flame bait each other with nonsensical reactionary come-backs. Forums should not give license to non-reason. Maybe I should put this responsibility square on the shoulders of users to bear, it is more the burden of the forum to humanize the net. While the internet has enabled people to communicate in a way that was never possible, people do not communicate to one another online as they do in real life. Instant messaging might be archaic and not lend to conveying true emotions (even with emoticons) but forums have that potential. Forums need to re-tool themselves into a stronger, more intuitive venue for someone to actually feel like he/she is a part of a global village rather than an anonymous user trying to be heard.
