Re: eBook Community's Twelfth Anniversary: State of The Group Messag

>>Can you point to one or more web forums you believe
are >successful in
community building and encouraging discussion? There
are a number of
web forum architectures out there, and clearly how
they are designed
have a major influence on usability and encouraging
participation.

There are a number of them that, pardon the
expression, suck royally.
(Makes me think that geeks are the last folks who
should be designing
these online forums! <smile/>)

Jon,

The software will not make the community, the people
are the community, but bad software can undermine
participation.

I know I'm stating the obvious but in any discussion
it pays to be clear.

The web forum I like best is Invision Power Board for
the following reasons:

Turnkey solution - it works right out of the box
without patches, addons and other programming stuff.

Good Usability - users or admins can select how much
posting help (easy text editor vs. basic) is
available.

Good security.

Deeply Spiderable - by search engines right out of the
box without having to modify your server settings. 
This is important to getting those "long tail"
referrals from search engines.  (I know from my own
server logs that those add up.)

Affordable - it's not cheap but I have run several
forums with different scripts and you get what you pay
for.

Scalable - it can handle traffic.

Good Administration Panel - yes it's big and
complicated but it is better laid out than most.

Modular - you can add things like member blogs to the
forum if you desire.

The other script I see a lot of is vBulletin.  I've
only used it as a forum member (eg. Mobileread and a
few others) and I do not like it as much as Invision
Power Board, but that may just be personal preference.




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