jwxie wrote:What if Forum was never invented? What do we expect it to do? How do we present our information?
the goal of phpBB? Another phpBB1, 2 and 3, just plain thread and discussion?
Regarding this I may have an interesting thread for you to read over at
The Admin Zone. I've been pondering why forum software alone hasn't been enough for my needs and I've also thought about streamlining stuff, I guess from an usability standpoint. So, at the moment I've ended up writing a new software based on many of the ideas I wrote about in that thread over at TAZ. I don't have good coding days very often so my work pace is very slow.
There is a lot of critic I can think about the current situatation. The one big thing about forum software is how much they all resemble each other. If you look at wiki software you can see how much different they are even if all of them work on the same basic idea. I feel like forum software authors have so long avoided reinventing the wheel that despite many technical differences the outcome of each is about the same. There have been some recent changes against this trend, like what I know about Vanilla is that it by default throws away things such as BBCode and prefers Markdown instead. And Markdown seems like it is a winner for a non-techy user. I'd like to see more differences than just that so that I'd actually have more choice and competition. The web has changed a lot but despite some minor enhancements about all of the forum software still resembles phpBB2 a lot.
Forum software, for what it is made for, works perfectly fine. I just don't like the fact that despite all the changes and innovation on the internet there really isn't that much change happening on any of the forum software out there. I'd like to get more out of a forum software without a need for external component (like a gallery software or WordPress), certainly without going to a portal direction or making it a CMS with multiple components. I hope that the ideas I linked to feel like a breath of fresh air. I'm not demanding any of them for phpBB4, I only hope it gives
something that helps phpBB4 to be more than just a forced replacement of phpBB3 like it was for phpBB2.
