1 Topic by mwace (edited by mwace 2008-07-03 12:41)

  • mwace
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  • Registered: 2008-07-03
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Topic: Revolutionizing forum design, lend me your fire

Ahoy, I'm Matthew Weigang (better known as 'mwace').

And I want you lend me your fire, your skills, and your time. I want you to leave whatever you're latest interest is to help me, help revolutionize forum designs.

I'm a somewhat eccentric visual design specialist and administrator of the Advanced Gamer's Forums (AGF), a nifty community forum that's been around the internet for four or five years. Our forum currently uses a modified MyBB forum code, but I'm looking to use PunBB as the core of our latest project and I have used PunBB in previous web design projects (such as this).

What I'm seeking to do is rethink forum designs with a focus on providing information users are looking for as directly as possible while minimizing the static content present on pages and using the latest cutting edge web based scripting (read: extensive, if not exclusive, use of AJAX). Listing recent threads in the forum index, listing recent posts in the thread listing, adapting imageboard features by creating seperate postbit for image posts, carefully controlling focus between post content and post information, and creating a pleasing visual design that remains unintrusive to functionality, to name a few concepts we're entertaining. Our goal is both a redesigned AGF but also an original forum design and AJAX interface that would serve under something like a public liscense for other communities interested in adopting it to use.

I'm in interested in hearing what ideas this community has for revolutionary or even just subtle new forum features, but I also need dedicated and talented devs to join with AGF's dev team in order to realize our ideas by the end of the summer. If you're capable with PHP, MySQL, CSS, Javascript, or have experience with AJAX and are willing to invest good time and effort to  help advance forum design, please shoot me a message on AIM (s/n is mwace05), shoot me an email at mwaece@gmail.com, or post somethin' on AGF.

More detailed information on the project:
http://a-g-f.net/showthread.php?tid=421&pid=4057

2 Reply by hcgtv

  • hcgtv
  • hcgtv
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Re: Revolutionizing forum design, lend me your fire

Hi Matthew,

Interesting ideas you have and I welcome them. Wish I could help but I'm already involved in more things that I have time for, but if you post your progress in this thread, I'd be more than glad to offer my critique.

One question, will you be using PunBB 1.2 or 1.3 as the basis?

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3 Reply by mwace (edited by mwace 2008-07-03 21:46)

  • mwace
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Re: Revolutionizing forum design, lend me your fire

I'm not sure. 1.2 was used as the basis for a content management system that's linked in the first post, but I'm learning as much as I can about 1.3 now. The extension system seems rather nifty, but we're not actually trying to add any new features to forums - if we were going to use any other forum code, like MyBB or PhpBB v3, we would actually be stripping features in order to keep the focus on content. Oooh, though the extension feature will probably be nice when we try to create a different postbit for image posts...

It will likely be 1.3, but I would be glad to hear any advice you have.