As a member of a lot of forums, I have repeatedly observed that nearly all forum software suffers from following issues:<p>1. Poor discoverability of interesting discussion threads.<p>2. Large number of duplicate threads covering the same discussion.<p>3. Linear discussion threads without heirarchy, making it difficult to follow discussions.<p>4. Annoying and detracting user signatures.<p>In order to solve these problems, I propose a new kind of forum wth the following features:<p>1. HN style voting for bringing interesting discussions to the top.<p>2. Stack Overflow style similar topic search to prevent multiple threads for the same topic.<p>3. Heirarchical threaded discussions.<p>4. No user signatures/minimal 1 line text only signatures.<p>5. Hosted service.<p>6. Mobile optimized version.<p>Basically this would be a hosted HN/reddit clone without the link aggregation bit.<p>Does this idea hold merit? Would forum owners/moderators be willing to jump to such a forum?
This is a difficult thing. In 2012/2013, forums are ubiquitous. If you're going to write a new forum software, you then have to make a choice:<p>1) Do you only target "people who don't have a forum yet but want to start one"?<p>2) Or do you make an upgrade/migration path from vBulletin/etc so that you can let existing forums move to your software?<p>If you go with #1, that's a long, long slog IMO. If you go with #2, you have an instant market of 100,000,000 forums.
The subject being discussed makes some difference though. A search functionality in a programming related forum is fundamental, while it probably isn't in a music one for example.<p>I've been running a music forum since 2001 (millions of posts) and I'm not sure an implementation of this type would suit... but these are all good concepts overall.