Putting the fun back into forum

January 8th, 2006

I’ve been working a bit more on the forums with the aim of making it as easy and pain-free as possible. Still a long way to go

Read Marking

I’ve implemented a marking system which records discussions you’ve read. As discussed previously in Fitt’s law and Forum View, I decided to make the whole discussion title hyperlink point to the first unread post. Sure, it screws around with the semantic purity of the hyperlink but it makes it a ton easier to navigate a forum without having to target a 16×16 icon.

Unread discussions have a red date box
Discussion titles for discussions with new comments are in bold
Unread posts have a green border on the left hand side

Try it out at the neonDragon.net Games Forums or at the Geneone Demonstration Forums.

The idea of bolding discussion titles for discussions with new comments comes from vBulletin. I believe it works well because your eye can concentrating on scanning down the list of discussion titles without having to take a holiday to analyze the icon.

To my knowledge, no other discussion boards use a border to indicate unread posts (I’m not even sure if most discussion boards indicate whether a comment has been read) but it’s been used on Evolution in the past and works fairly well.

Making predictions

Since the forums now record information on which discussions the user has read (and how much of it) in addition to where users are creating discussions/adding comments, I want to experiment with collaborative filtering perhaps to help users find discussions which they may find interesting but haven’t viewed.

I also believe the forum homepage should become adaptive and customized - if the user only ever visits 4 or 5 forums (and I speak from personal experience), there is no point of displaying all 30 of them, certainly not with equal weight.

Based on this information, it would also be possible to find discussions that the user may be interested in and place them on the forum homepage. This should make the forum more inviting than simply linking to a few dozen forums.

A digg-like system could be used in addition to read/post data to determine what discussions to show.