A question about online forums (nothing to do with photography)

I'm looking to integrate a forum application with a community-relations type website. It needs to be ASP.NET and SQL Server based, and there are a number of options.

One, obviously, is to pick from a variety of third party ones, and set about all the integration work, how much of which there'll be, I'm not yet sure.

The other, not so obviously, is to roll my own. I know that it would be a lot of work to build a fully featured forum application from scratch, but it wouldn't be anywhere near from scratch, since the database and a lot of the functionality underlying the site I'm integrating with is already written, and supports the data structures needed.

My question relates to how much of the forum eye-candy is actually important, since it's there that the majority of the work would be if I rolled my own. So the more important that side of it is, the more work it would be, so the more sensible it would be to integrate an existing 3rd party application.

So, specifically, to those that use a variety of online forums:

How important are features like:

- quoting others' posts
- smilies
- signatures
- bold/italic/colours
- uploading (or displaying inline) pics
- avatars

... and other features that you may think are important (such as an extensive moderation tool set perhaps).

I was surprised to discover the forums at PCAdvisor are very basic indeed, yet they're quite popular.

TBH, this is pretty much the only forum I use that doesn't use VBulletin. One other uses PHPBB, and I post on probably seven or eight on a regular basis.

It's annoying to not be able to set how many answers per page. It's annoying not to be able to set my own timezone.

I also administer one forum and another guy on the admin team is very good. He's extended things so that we limit quote lengths, remove pics in quotes, the editor is full WYSIWYG and signature text is only presented at 80%. (too many big sigs!)

ASP is terribly supported. Why does it need to be Windoze?

To answer your question: I tend not to quote unless I need to, but all of the parts you've identified are, to my mind, essential in a modern forum. Once you've built the community, then you can live on being different, but to my mind it's not the way to start, especially if it's a tech-savvy audience. They will be turned off immediately in my view.

Bret

Quoting others' posts is immensely useful, and inline pics are very nice. I can happily live without the rest.

However, I would recommend some software that allows all that. Not sure what it's called, but it's what is used by http://yacf.co.uk/forum/. It's the best forum format of the many I've seen, and is customisable.

quoting others' posts Some use as long as people know how to use the feature intelligently and don't quote an entire long post repeatedly in a thread.

smilies Pointless eye candy for the kiddies.

signatures Depends on forum matter. Can be useful as in a forum like this where equipment can be shown. Ban images.

bold/italic/colours Some use as long as people understand how best to use them.

uploading (or displaying inline) pics Depends on forum type and content. Can be misused.

avatars Pointless, space wasting distractions.

Michael

I have to disagree here. I'm a moderator on a couple of forums and I have to say that good use of smilies can deflate an argument or even prevent it arising. We take so many cues in normal speech form body language. This cannot be seen on a forum and an innocuous comment, without the corresponding body language can be misunderstood. Smilies can, to a degree, replace the body language (sorry, couldn't resist )

Ditto. There are times where you need a "tongue in cheek" smiley.

Graphical smileys don't need to be provided. People can use text ones

"I have to say that good use of smilies can deflate an argument or even prevent it arising."

"There are times where you need a "tongue in cheek" smiley."

I don't think those arguments stand close examination.

If a person makes a conscious decision to use a deflationary smiley that means they have realised that the comments they are making are contentious. They would therefore do better not to make the comments in a contentious manner - or at all - in the first place.

Michael

A forum (for me) would be a much duller place without a little banter, and a smiley can ensure (hopefully) that what's said is taken the way it was intended.

Dan

We're communicating informally in brief bits of text, so visual aids such as smileys help replace the cues which facial expression and tone of voice give. Avatars give a 'face' to the person you are talking to, and are a visual aid to help quickly work out who has said what.

Don't like extraneous stuff like graphic banners in signatures, which tend to clutter up the page, and HATE animated graphics!

Smileys are essential IMHO, to convey subtelties of language that not everyone has the skills to convey within the words.

So is that statement an impatient one? Or is it to be taken as a friendly confirmation of agreement with one side of the argument? Or is it offered slightly tongue-in-cheek to lighten the mood of a brewing storm?

IMHO without the smileys we could never be sure.

No, that's not correct. It means that they know that the comments they are making are open to misinterpretation of tone.

I think the text smileys are better looking anyway ... But I think they are important for the reasons stated above. There is a limit though as some forums I've been on have animated smileys (dancing banana's!), various sizes, hi-res, etc I don't think there is any need to expand on what we already have, infact I'm not sure what half of the current ones mean anyway!

... we have lots of animated smilies and they are used regularly. We have something like 50 and it's "not enough".

User Audience is the only important thing here: international, young / old, tech / non-tech.

Bret

I was going to try and add something witty and clever to this thread without using smilies.

Unfortunately I am stuck for words, smilies do make life an awful lot easier.