I host a podcast about the Once Upon a Time TV show. This podcast is getting rave reviews and quickly growing in popularity, keeping ours among the top-three podcasts about Once Upon a Time.
But with this popularity comes a good problem—so much feedback and discussion! We receive long emails from listeners with great theories about past, current, and future episodes. It's getting to be more than we can handle and easily share.
The comments on each blog post are also becoming extremely active, and commenters are wanting to discuss issues that are asides to the post's content. Again, this is a good problem!
So now that the community has grown up, it's time to bring the community together with a forum. But that's not so easy.
There are many free and paid forum solutions out there. But I'll be testing them for some ten requirements that I believe every forum needs.
- Guest access. Visitors should not have to register to read or search the forum.
- Social registrations. User accounts are a requirement, but don't have to be a pain. Users should be able to “mindlessly” create a forum account by logging in with their Facebook, Twitter, or Google ID, as well as create a separate account.
- Freedom. The point of a forum is to let people initiate their own conversations. Limiting this freedom to post new content is distrusting of the humans who come to the forum. If new members must wait any longer than a couple hours before they can start their own topics, the forum is a legalistic prison.
- Maintain branding. Forums should not all look alike. They should fit within the branding of the parent website.
- Formatting. Writers must have the simple tools to bold, italicize, hyperlink, quote, list, and apply many other formatting to their posts. This shouldn't require HTML knowledge.
- Social sharing. Forums have been social networks before social-networking was popular. As such, they must integrate with other social networks for easy crossposting and aggregation.
- Friendly spam protection. Forums are easily bombarded with spam. But this is also usually easy to fix without requiring visitors to pull their heads inside-out to read a Captcha. Spam protection should be invisible.
- Mobile-friendly. The full web is no longer just for desktop computers. A forum must be accessible and friendly to mobile devices without an app (while still integrating with popular forum apps like Tapatalk).
- Easy to moderate. Everything up until this point has been about the user experience, which is the most important. But a good online forum should also be easy for administrators and moderators to manage.
- Website integration. Unless the forum is the sole purpose of a website, the forum must be easy to integration with the rest of the website via widgets, accounts, comments, and more.
That's what I'm looking for. I'll be evaluating the top, free and one-time-licensed packages:
I may already be leaning toward phpBB for its power and lots of plugins out there to make it do what I require.
What are your thoughts? As a user, what makes a forum easier for you and more enjoyable? What do you hate about forums?
As an administrator, what features do you like in a forum? What works best for you?
SPELL CHECK IS A MUST…. for some reason my spell check does not work on your commenting / posting blog and I look like an idiot cause I do not spell well (any more)
Your anti spam must be friendly to the visually impaired…. I always have trouble with those sites that have the FUNKY PHRASES / COPY THE LETTERS AND NUMBERS…. because I can not see well. A simple check box… THIS IS NOT SPAM at the bottom or the top of the page to verify a human being not a computer is posting the information.
ALLOW larger fonts… for the same vision problem. I have trouble reading anything smaller than 12 pt font.. my browser lets me enlarge the writing on most pages but when you type in the comment … the letters are too small and it make it hard to proof read.
The rest of the rules look pretty good.
Nonnie,
.
ALLOWING a person to edit their previous comments might be nice… I always find my mistakes, typos, miss-spelled words after I hit the POST COMMENT button.
SPELL CHECK IS A MUST…. for some reason my spell check does not work on your commenting / posting blog and I look like an idiot cause I do not spell well (any more)
Your anti spam must be friendly to the visually impaired…. I always have trouble with those sites that have the FUNKY PHRASES / COPY THE LETTERS AND NUMBERS…. because I can not see well. A simple check box… THIS IS NOT SPAM at the bottom or the top of the page to verify a human being not a computer is posting the information.
ALLOW larger fonts… for the same vision problem. I have trouble reading anything smaller than 12 pt font.. my browser lets me enlarge the writing on most pages but when you type in the comment … the letters are too small and it make it hard to proof read.
The rest of the rules look pretty good.
Nonnie,
.
ALLOWING a person to edit their previous comments might be nice… I always find my mistakes, typos, miss-spelled words after I hit the POST COMMENT button.
Great question–computer science and stats geeks have a lot of great forums. Aviation has some good platforms but lots of amateurs in those. How is GSPN community doing? I know the 48Days.net is kind of a ghost town…the things happening in there aren’t very substantive. Are bulletin boards a thing of the past? Why not use an existing social media platform like fb?
The Ning platform is great for starting a social network, but I don’t want a new network, just a place where fans can share and read others theories. Ning requires too much of members, and there are many things about the Ning platform that I can’t stand because it lacks customization.
I opted for phpBB with some heavy customization for our Once Upon a Time forums, which are now the most active forums for the TV show. http://ONCEpodcast.com/forums
Other common platforms like Facebook wouldn’t work well for the needs I had, especially since some people don’t like being known by their real names on the Internet.