What would you like to see in a forum?

Just wondering what features you would like to see in a forum?

um....admin powers
delete, add, edit users and posts
add catagories
add forums


hey check out my free forum i downloaded:

my aol sn = nstuer16

so add me if u have it
i have to mow the lawn so i will be back on the forum in 30 min

I have recently written a forum loosely modelled around this one. My own favorite features (naturally the hardest to code) were, displaying users online, remember login details (using cookies), mark un read threads and messages and adding 'goto first unread post' links. Some kind of vbcode, smilies, icons e.t.c tend to keep the punters happy

I even included a personal mailing system where you can send pm's to users and have a full hotmail-style inbox.

And I did all this without a database (flat file all the way).

Take it wherever you want. If you really want ideas try copying your favorite bits of all the forums you've ever been on.

Banks

I've done that actually. But I'm hoping to run into a feature that you wish you have, but doesn't exist. (high hopes maybe)

Thanks for the post though, the idea of making PM like E-Mail is cool.

P.S. How fast does it run without a Database?

I think the big challenge to a flat file forum would be scale. As long as you are comfortable reading an entire set of data then flat files shouldn't be a big deal. Simultaneous writes would break the system (or cause unwanted symptoms) immediately, I would bet, and that would become more and more likely as a forum grew.

Hey, how about I actually address the main question in the thread?
I would like to see forum that runs well on normal html browsers (Explorer, Firebird, etc) but runs exceptionally on its own client.

The client would basically be similar to apple's sherlock in some respects, except customized for browsing a forum.

Yeah The limit of the flat file system would be scaleability. I doubt my scripts would handle very many users at all. I wrote them more for the challenge of doing it than to actually implement. I may well use them at some point but only in situations where few users are going to be invloved.

I also enjoyed getting custom uploaded avatars to work.

Banks

samsm >> Im not sure what you mean about having it run exceptionally on its own client, I can only assume the language its wrritten it.

As for browsers, I have IE, Mozilla and Opera. So I'm testing it in a fairly wide variety of browsers.

banks >> customs avatars don't worry me that much, it's getting the smiles and new posts to work that has me worried. Haven't thought of how to links everything to the right user yet.

smilies are easy you just have a function that uses string_replace to replace "" with "<img src=images/smile1.gif> or what ever.

I don't quite see what you mean about the rest of it but I would recomending thinking about the overall structure a bit before you start coding otherwise it will get messy.

I'm happy to give other ideas/help if you need it.

I didn't quite understand the "run exceptionally on its own client" bit either...

First of all, can you picture a client devoted to forum navigation? Step away from the browser, picture an application like sherlock or perhaps you IM application that is honed in on the task at hand.

You'd be able to do things like get a user's profile without leaving a thread, quickly bookmark pages without reloading, get notifications in a nice categorized queue rather than through email. Endless possibilities.

It's a ridiculously big feature, by the way, just something that came to mind, not particularly practical. ;-)

I've actually put a good deal of thought into the structure of how the information is organized in the database. (had to re-write everything, for the better though)

The problem with the smiles is that I want to make an option to disable HTML tags so people can copy and paste code in the forum. If the tage are disabled, the <img src... wont work.

I think one way around it would be to strip the tags, and then replace the smile code with the html.

Sort of off topic, are PHP session id's always the same. I checked mine at php freaks "http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/41/7.php" with three different browsers and they all came up the same.

I was thinking of using these for auto-login, they seem reliable and unique to the user.

Aren't you worried about speed problems when your site gets busy?

Moved to the Lounge from the PHP forum

I think that would fall under the broad heading of "scaleability problems". ;-)
Despite the aforementioned limits, I bet there is a good chance this could be useful. I know that I often have brief projects with 1-5 other people and it would be nice to have something like this that could be thrown up in a second with next to no configuration worries.
Not something I'm actually interested in, but I could see it being useful.

Yeah it's not really that practical it was more of a challenge to me and helped me learn php. I may adapt it (or re-write) to run with MySql sometime. I'm possibly changing my server soon so I will do it all then. (If I can be bothered).

Banks