The Community College of Rhode Island asked me, before I leave them forever and transfer to URI, to develop a public discussion board for the foreign languages department.

Our goal is to eventually attract a world-wide audience that will tell students their first-hand experience with their country's language and culture.

My goal is to develop a customized forum for them in PHP that will leave out some of the eye-candy and fluff you see often on discussion boards such as this one (no offense ), and is easier to navigate.

My second goal is to make the forum as personalized as possible, in a unique and creative way. Instead of using avatars and signatures like every forum does, I want to do something different...

...something where members will know eachother not by avatar but by something else... Does anyone have ideas?

The forums can be found here:
http://language.scoutprovidence.com

My main questions are:

Is the forum easy to navigate?

Can you find an alternative to avatars?

Feel free to register as a new member. The forums are in a beta stage, of course, so feel free to try and break the forums, or find a hole that would give you moderator access, if you'd like... just don't be so malicious that my hosting account will be suspended, or I can't get into FTP to fix the problem. :P

Part 2

Hi, I just made some finishing touches on new PHP-based forum software. The particular forum I'm about to show you is for the Community College of Rhode Island's Foreign Languages Department. Our main goal is to attract a global audience and give students exposure to actual people from the foreign countries to talk about their cultures, because that is far more valuable than getting it second hand from a textbook.

You can find them here: http://language.scoutprovidence.com

Pretty much everything in these forums are able to be changed from the control panel, from who is allowed to do what to whether one email address can have multiple accounts, to how the forums look, to which characters you can select from on the bottom of the "post" form (which is now a set of characters with the accents)

I especially enjoy the navigation system, especially when you register as a member and view the forums in frames.

Besides your input on whether you like what I did or not, I do have a request for suggestions:

I want to know a unique, creative way to personalize members. By unique and creative, I mean going beyond the avatar and signatures; I want something that would make someone say, "Woah, that's different."

...of course, if I can't find anything, I'll have to resort to the old avatars.

To be honest, this is probably the most boring looking forum I have ever seen. Creative a more intriguing look is your most important issue. Not developing a new type of "Wow" signature. Forums are all the same because people like them that way. There is a familiarity where you can get onto any of them and not have to learn how to use it everytime. My suggestion: work on the design.

I agree 100% with carmack.

You said you want to attract a global audience, well, your forum should look as clean and professional as some of the existing forum packages available or people are going to be less likely to join.

The look of a forum is key, hopefully people will spend a lot of time reading and posting on your forum, but if the design makes it uncomfortable to look at for an extended period of time, which yours does, people are are going to be less likely to spend much time there.

There are several top-notch forums out there, vBulletin which we all enjoy here, and phpBB are probably 2 of the best, and to top that off, phpBB is free! I would suggest analyzing what makes a forum such as vBulletin so comfortable to use, look, accessibilty, all of it and then if you still want to create your own forum, try and encorporate these features into it.

I suppose I could try to get more icons in to make it not look so "textual". The groups have the ability to have icons next to them; I just haven't found or made free good icons yet, but one thing I wanted to do was not make the forums so... complicated and cluttered. I like to follow the "less is more" principal. I could also make generally more images to make it look a little more than plain, though.

If you go to forums like this one I'm posting in now, there are some great features that I might use, but a lot of the options and stuff on the page are, quite frankly, pure eye candy that adds on to load times and bandwidth.

For example, do I really need to see that little "posting rules" box positioned awkwardly on the bottom of every page I go, or isn't that really something that people just have to read once and then move on?

Why do people have to "rate" threads, or see how many times it was viewed? I mean, people don't need to know other's opinions of a thread! Besides, how can you rate a thread that is active and is changing by the hour? When people click on a thread, does their decision to do so really depend on how many times it was viewed? Some of the little numbers applied to each thread and category, IMO, just clutter up the screen.

You must agree that the general layout of the forum I designed isn't that much different than other forums you've seen, correct? You click on a category, see the list of threads (which now is rather bare, since it hasn't even gone public yet, and school doesn't start summer sessions for a couple more weeks), click on a thread, and you get the posts... If you want to go back, there's a navigation bar at the top that will take you back.

The register, options, login/out, and search links aren't in any strange place; just at the top of the page just like they logically would be.

...sorry if it sounds like I'm ranting. I'm really not, I'm just asking for clarification as to how the forum is lacking in design and/or layout. I agree it's simple, but is that really bad? (also, try looking around again, I think you posted this while I was working on the css a little bit, and might have seen it when it did look bad )

But because I not only believe in the "less is more" principal, I also believe in the "member is always right" principal...

This is what I can do... is give members the option to choose what they want to see in listing of categories and threads. For example, right now, all you see in the listing is the thread subject, reply count, author, and date. If someone wanted to see how many times it was viewed, they could do so by going to their options and specifying that. If they, for whatever reason, wanted to get rid of the author and date from it, they could do so.

Don't think that I'm just rejecting your criticisms, I'm just defending the way I intended to lay it out.

For starters you posted this thread in the "Site Review and Suggestions" forum, and we have done just that, all we are tying to say is that many people out there are used to seeing specific things on a forum.

For example:
you mentioned that "If someone wanted to see how many times it was viewed, they could do so by going to their options and specifying that."

If a lot of people are used to seeing that type of info by default, it's going to appear awkward at first to a new visitor. I for one do not want to have to sift through dozens of options to get a forum looking the way I'm used to having a forum look. It's the smaller details such as this that make up the big picture, if forum appears awkward to a user, they may be less likely to frequent that forum as opposed to the hundreds of other forums already running on the web.

I agree with Cmonkey here. You may say you don't like all of the extras but you need to find out if your users do. It doesn't matter what you like since it is your users who will be making the forum successful.

this begs the question of why develop your own forum software? if you are specifically going after a threaded forum and were frustrated that you couldn't find that software, maybe check out phorum. www.phorum.org, they let the user choose threaded or flat forum style, and their code is bordering on beautiful, very well organized.

Other than that, yeah the forums are easy to navigate, I saw on one spot where clicking on reply as a gues shows an error page, its typical to not even show the option if its not available, that way the error pages aren't shown and we all avoid a little frustration.

I'd give ya 6/10 for the initial effort, just because phorum is so good .

:: ! spacey ::

Didn't you already post this site on this forum? My review doesn't change from last time.

Yes carmack: http://www.webmaster-talk.com/showthread.php?t=9475

I don't understand the logic behind finding an alternative to avatars/signatures, even if you went as far as allowing people upload audio to add to each of their posts, it's still in esense, a signature. And any little image that a user adds to his/her posts is still going to be thought of as an avatar.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for new ideas and alternatives to "the norm" on the web, but it seems like you're focusing so much on making your forum customizable, that you're forgetting idea behind forums. They are a place to exchange information, an all text forum with no avatars, fancy buttons, etc. can still be just as usefull as a forum like vBulletin.

Why not concentrate on getting a working version of what you have up and running, and then when you have aquired some members, ask them what they think would make the forum better for them.

Originally Posted by carmack

Didn't you already post this site on this forum?

Both threads merged.

Dave

Oh... it was there, sorry about that, Dave.

Alright... I've made several changes to the forums based on your suggestions.

Right now, by default, each category tells you how many total threads there are, plus how many of those threads are updated.

Then, in the list of threads, you can now see how many times it was viewed, and who made the last post to that thread and when, plus you can jump right to that last post.

These are all available to be disabled if you register.

I've also added an option to quote individual posts in the thread.

They are a place to exchange information, an all text forum with no avatars, fancy buttons, etc. can still be just as usefull as a forum like vBulletin.

That's kind of why I was a little against putting too much clutter on the forums I developed. The only reason I was concerned about the avatars is because I think part of what makes a forum work is having people kind of "identify" eachother by more than a name.

EDIT: Oh, and also, where did you find that error when replying?