An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

I’ve been trying to think of a project I can put my skills toward lately especially as I am currently coming to grips with Ruby on Rails and one of the things I kept coming back to was writing yet (not just) another forum script.

I know there is probably already too many forum scripts in the wild but only one comes close to usability nirvana and that is Vanilla (bbPress also comes close), the rest in my opinion are a usability nightmare and just don’t facilitate the quick & easy exchange of information like they should.

Reading Tim’s blog helped adding to my motivation and gave me some extra ideas with his post about Forki, which is a concept that mixes a forum with a wiki where forum posts can be promoted to the wiki so it is using the same data but presenting it in two totally different forms one that is ideal for discussions and the other for reference purposes.

However I’m not just going to steal Tim’s idea as I have a lot of my own ideas I want to integrate first and may do something completely different than Tim’s concept, I especially want to use my experience as a quality assurance analyst and unofficial usability consultant that I have gotten through my day job. I want the forums to flow in a way where they are simplistic to use but not lacking in features so everyone will be able to easily do what they want to do without making the interface cluttered & confusing, possibly by building in some “AI” so the forum can adapt to your usage patterns.

For example if you often visit the forum index, login and then navigate to a certain category or to all unread posts then the forum should recognize that and redirect you. Another example, if for example you use a certain tag a lot like the <tag> </tag> I am using to tag this post then the forum should give you a quick tag to save you from typing it all the time.

Of course all functionality like that would be configurable, possibly by using roles and by roles I don’t mean something based on your level of skill or your status in the forum but something that describes the nature of most of the posts you make to the forums so the user interface can be catered towards your needs. For example if you’re a software developer then you’re going to want things like a code quicktag but probably aren’t interested in smilies and if you do use a smiley you want it to render as text.

Anyway it is time to let my mind think it’s way through all the ideas I have and start coming up with some design concepts so stay tuned for updates and if you have any ideas of your own then by all means leave a comment.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS