June 4th, 2013 at 7:48 PM
Over the past several years, it goes without saying that forums have generally declined as a form of online discussion as facebook, instagram, and other forms of online social discussion have become increasingly popular. The need for forums seems to be something that is left to support forums, etc... but as a community thing, is it still the modern trend? It appears to slowly be on the decline.
IP.Board is an example of forum software that attempts to stay ahead of the wheel. Many elements of social networking are packaged with IPB, but at heart IPB still is, and always will be, traditional forum software. Really, social networking and forums are two incompatible concepts that can't really be merged seamlessly. It's not that I don't like IPB. I love IPB, and it's one of my favorite solutions for forum software, but the concept itself still sticks towards traditional forum software.
It would without doubt be a massive project to take on, but I like taking on massive projects. My concept idea was basically to design forum software with a completely new philosophy altogether. Instead of revolving around boards and predefined structure, it would revolve around content feeds and a self-adjusting structure, and feeds would generated based on how content was tagged. In addition, while the administrator could define many feeds to be "default feeds" on the board index, users could create their own feeds and sort content by different tags, relevance to certain criteria, etc... And feeds that were popular might show up on the portal homepage to be "liked" and rated by members.
Basically, the goal would be to revolutionize the concept to be less based on boards and a predefined structure, to be more fluid and content based. The ultimate concept is to design forum software that adjusts to the discussions being created and revolves around the content first and foremost.
Of course I have yet to write a single line of code for the project, but I think it might have some potential if it is coded well. Any thoughts?
IP.Board is an example of forum software that attempts to stay ahead of the wheel. Many elements of social networking are packaged with IPB, but at heart IPB still is, and always will be, traditional forum software. Really, social networking and forums are two incompatible concepts that can't really be merged seamlessly. It's not that I don't like IPB. I love IPB, and it's one of my favorite solutions for forum software, but the concept itself still sticks towards traditional forum software.
It would without doubt be a massive project to take on, but I like taking on massive projects. My concept idea was basically to design forum software with a completely new philosophy altogether. Instead of revolving around boards and predefined structure, it would revolve around content feeds and a self-adjusting structure, and feeds would generated based on how content was tagged. In addition, while the administrator could define many feeds to be "default feeds" on the board index, users could create their own feeds and sort content by different tags, relevance to certain criteria, etc... And feeds that were popular might show up on the portal homepage to be "liked" and rated by members.
Basically, the goal would be to revolutionize the concept to be less based on boards and a predefined structure, to be more fluid and content based. The ultimate concept is to design forum software that adjusts to the discussions being created and revolves around the content first and foremost.
Of course I have yet to write a single line of code for the project, but I think it might have some potential if it is coded well. Any thoughts?
