Pocoo

open source bulletin board


Idea Pool

Please tell us your ideas for a really good forum system that we want pocoo to be:

Ideas

Posting:

  • threads should consist of posts, which are easily seperatable and movable to other threads (some kind of improved thread-splitting)
  • crossposting into more than one forum
  • Tracking of (most interested in) forums and threads
  • private forums (just visible for certain groups)
  • PNs to more than one user and to groups
  • "most useful topic" rating - (blackbird: +1 for that)
  • CSS/Ajax based rating system (check out http://www.komodomedia.com/blog/index.php/2006/01/09/css-star-rating-part-deux/ )
  • Ajax-Quickpost function like in vBulletin: posting without loading a new page.

Formatting:

  • Give the user multiple choices of formatting: BBtags, Wiki-formatting, a WYSIWYG editor, Markdown, etc. BBTags should probably be default, since that's what most people are used to.

Usability:

  • A full featured PM system with folders and filters. And symbols that show if a message is replied or not.
    • Use categories or "private tags" instead of folders, perhaps, so that a message can be put into more than one category (like gmail's labels, for example).
  • Smarter search functionality than is typical on most forums, some examples:
    1. context (or 'domain' if you prefer) searching that overrides things like:
      1. word ignore lists
      2. parsing annoyances such as decimals and dashes which are rather important when dealing with software
    2. some sort of auto-FAQ (or at least FAQ assistance)
    3. searching FAQs such as with 1.b above as options
    4. technical searches (builds all the prior points), examples include debugger output, stdout, and the like that should find a direct match but often parses out, ignores, treats as illegal search input, or other silly things
  • An info who's replying to a thread atm using AJAX ( http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/42307/ )
  • There should be a setting that tries to avoid the creation of double posts
  • Enhanced moderation functions. E.g. a mod moves a topic into a new forum. Either the OP gets a PM or a short note is added to the bottom of the first article of tha thread. Also standard mod messages world be nice. Like "Please note your writing style etc.."
    • List of unanswered topics by category, day, week, month...
  • Spell checking like http://orangoo.com/spell/
  • Users should be able to toggle the visibility of signatures and avatars
  • Users should be able to toggle a color filter. This filter overrides color-codes in posts, so you don't need to see posts in bright red, green and blue. Inspired by the color-filter in modern IRC clients.
  • Attachments in a post
  • ajaxy "marking as read"
  • As much Jabber integration as possible (subscription for threads, Javascript Jabber client etc.)

Security:

  • a small tool which shows how good a password is / maybe a pwgen

Anti-Spam:

  • Anti-Spam forum aka Promotion-Forum aka Trash-Forum: Mark a category as Anti-Spam and set this category and all topics in it with a "meta robots noindex,nofollow", posted links in topics with a "link rel=nofollow" and whatever prevents spamlinks to get indexed.
  • A Spam-Rating-System. This system does not prevent the spam to be posted but improves the speed with which the spam can be deleted. Each post gets a spamicity-index and users can mark a thread as spam, which increases the spamicity-index by one. Once the counter exceeds a certain threshold the post disappears. Now it can be sent to the moderators to recheck it - they can decide to delete the post or to mark is as non-spam permanently (that means to lock the post to spamicity-index 0), in what case the post appears again at the same position. A variation would be that a thread can be directly deleted, without consulting the moderators, but this would be only advisable with a higher threshold value and somewhat more thrusted users. Another tweak would be a permission like 'Can mark as spam' which more trusted users would get, making them spamadmins. This systems allows fine grained control over what users are able to do against spam and mimics the rating system of Digg for example which has proved to be working well.

User management:

  • Ignore lists per user
  • there should be a general concept of user groups with ACLs, all users should be in groups and the group options should be changeable without affecting other groups (e.g. unlimited signature length for moderator-group)
    • Hierarchical permissions such that permissions on a given forum cascade to its posts, permissions on a group cascade to any subgroups, etc. would be more flexible (albeit more difficult to implement, I assume).
  • free editable user ranks - maybe with different pictures for each rank (playfull i know)
  • groups should have a moderator, much like phpBB

Other functions:

Done

  • real threads like in usenet!
  • LaTeX rendering bbcode tag.
  • a solution for forgotten passwords
  • multiple groups per user
  • tags (like in every serious Web2.0 app)
  • Jabber/XMPP nofifying of replies to posts
  • Abstract notifications so that, for example plugins can implement provider specifics such as SMTP, XMPP, and NNTP or just extend details of already supported providers (can also be worded as "no hard coded email notifications")
  • Tracking of read postings

Rejected