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How we can have a better forum - part I: what everybody can see

What can we do to have a better forum? Determine what we can do better, and build it! This is what I'm doing here. Let's take a look at today's forums, identify their problems, and see how we can do a better job.

First thing I see which can be improved is forum message categorization. Today's forums have done some effort to let users categorize messages. Which steps are? Today's forums have subforums. Or subgroups.

Forum has some superuser, or administrator, which has said that this forum will have this set of subforums. So the user coming to post question sees a list of forums/subforums, or big list of groups/subgroups/subsubgroups. The user decides which category to post the question to. And finally she or he posts.

Several problems can be seen here. It can be hard for administrator to define good set of subforums. And it can be hard for the user to determine which subforum to post to.

As a result, the visitor may start performing some unwelcomed behavior. She or he starts posting under subforum which administrator think about as inappropriate. Or the visitor copies post into several subforums which everyone think about as inappropriate.

But who said the visitor is wrong? What the forum is for? Is the forum for forum admins, or for its visitors?

My goal is to develop a self-organizing forum which in ideal will have no need for admins. First step is to give power to define message categories to the visitor. The visitor is always right.

So wish me luck, or better give me your feedback and recommendations.


Denis Krukovsky.

February 20, 2006 4:09 PM
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