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My personal jihad against online forums began back when usenet access became available at my university’s computer lab in 1994. There were thousands of online members commenting on various topics in a linear format. Depending what alt.* group you subscribed to, each member was competing for the resident expert status. That's ancient history in internet years. Usenet is still alive and well but forums have evolved into many different breeds from their original genus.

Forums are so popular they have even included support sites for software companies. Apple Computer’s discussion area easily covers any topic a Mac owner would find in their technical support articles. The number one forum site in the world is 2channel, based in Japan, with a reported 2 million plus posts per day. Gaia online in the US is a close second with a close 1.3 million. For any interest, profession, software, or fetish there is an online forum dedicated to that subject.

The typical forum these days is a highly elaborate table of information, channels and posts, who is online, bad icons and even worse color schemes. Each of these features gives the unique user experience of trying to find the back button. A forum may be its own site and sole purpose, or like PopSyndicate just a feature for readers to have general discussion. The most successful forums have an elite community among regular visitors that may or may not welcome new members or noobs.

One major problem with forums is the design. In terms of functionality, a forum site is extremely simple. Unlike chat rooms, users do not need to be present to participate in a conversation. The answer and respond method (and respond and respond) is a linear function. Whether a result of software competition or usage discovery, the simple nature of conversations has turned into over-classification and coding.

With all the different sites and different varieties of forums available, every forum has one thing in common, they are their own island. There is no grand network of forums that lets a person join a single forum and instantly become a member of another forum. Each site has its own membership requirements. Usually it's a username and password and a valid email address. Forums can get very elaborate with custom avatars, instant message IDs, privacy settings, friends settings, customer layouts, membership status and loyalty points. At Warren Ellis’ forum site, The Engine, users have to own up to being actual human beings with full first and last names and a photo. On the other hand, Mark Millar’s millarworld will review your “application” before becoming an accepted member. Most of the time, however, the username you choose will be unique enough that you can use it at multiple sites. It is unlikely that wannabee2028 is taken anywhere yet.

The vast majority of forums have the same features.  Threads (or topics if you used the English language) are either flat or threaded.  A threaded thread is simply a topic that will show a reply being indented to a previous reply in a hierarchal fashion.  Flat threads are listed in order the comments or replies are created. There is almost a level of security too to avoid spammers from highjacking a forum.  Captcha’s is a common one where the user has to validate the letters and numbers displayed in an image because computers are still unable to read bad penmanship let alone graphics. In my personal opinion, captchas are a stop-gap against spam bots. They will figure out how to populate your favorite forum one way or another.

One of the most underutilized features is moderatoring. Forums can assign members to police others. I don’t quite remember what happened to netiquette as it use to be in my older usenet groups, but most of the popular forums I lurk around have a strong need for some banning. One forum in particular has a very clear behavior policy. You have to use your real name, show your photo, and be polite or Warren Ellis’ The Engine’s enforcer vixens will get you.

Why else do forums suck?  Because they are everywhere and because you have no choice.  If you want to have any participation in an online community, it will have to be in the form of a forum, be it web calendars, photo galleries, bookmarks, and the simplest ones called comments, remember the guest book?  Now that social networks are the new “dot com” craze, forums are the easiest and simplest way for your website to have its own network. 

If only they didn't require you to register each and every time.  How many forums do you belong to?  Do you have a MySpace or an LJ account?  Do you read entertainment sites like NewsARama or Rotten Tomatoes or Podcast Pickle?  How do you post photos? Try asking a research question, or even complimenting a friend’s latest article without having to join a forum.  From a webmaster perspective, I completely understand.  Users should be accountable for what they say online.  However, I personally have no idea how many groups and forums I belong to, but I've had to join each and every one, and that's a very tedious way to be online.

OpenID is a budding technology with a really simple premise: one ID for all your sites.  I think Microsoft tried something similar with their Passport sign-on but there was an issue with Passports being attached to people’s personal computers (added with security vulnerability problems).  OpenID is way for users to create a verification system to be able to participate on multiple websites without necessarily having to become members.  On one hand, it is good for users who do not feel they want to give out a lot of personal information, on the other site owners can open up their systems to more users without being attacked by spammers.  Like adding digital signatures to emails, users can post or comment where they choose through strong verification.  It isn't meant to be used for banking or a means to access sensitive information. It isn’t any more secure than the methods you currently use to join a forum.  Unfortunately, only a few sites currently support such a system and only Dupral, a forum software company, makes use of it.

Anyone involved in either web design or some “behind the scenes” role will eventually have to make a decision in what forum software is the best one to use on their site. Map out which features are important to you and measure each of the software options against your requirements. Don’t forget the requirements you didn't even know you needed: comments (threaded or flat), user themes, avatars, posting captchas, email confirmation, developer customization, posting points, data storage (database type), programming language, hosting requirements, emoticons :-), WYSWYG editor, quoting, signatures, sticky threads, shadow threads, closed threads, split threads, hot linking, image attachments, SEO versions, search limits, BBcode, HTML code, safe HTML code, polls, calendars, statistics, email notification, rss feeds, and the list goes on.

Not sure what forum software is best for you?  Don’t worry.  There is a forum for that too.

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.

Image used with permission from Penny Arcade.

Chris Williams often picks fights in other people’s forums.  He targets anyone who quotes Monty Python in their sig.  He’s a jerk… and a flamer.