Which Website/Forum Features do You Feel are Necessary?

I'm in the process of sorting out an upgrade path which will most likely land us on a phpbb forum.

We're going to have to convert to vBulletin then to phpbb since there is no direct path from Xenforo.

This is something that I will be putting a lot of time and testing into, so I want to make sure we get it right.

So I wanted to ask before I begin.

Which features on this website/forum do you like most? Which do you like least? What could be improved? What do we need that we currently don't have? Think of what you look at first when you visit the site. Everything!

Let the feedback begin!

Thanks folk

 

Alerts and PM's are the tits.

Never been a huge fan of the shoutbox, but that's a personal preference. It just strikes me as kind of "brain farty" like Twitter or something.

I would prefer "recent threads" to be more of a focus, and the traditional forum structure to be secondary. Don't know about everyone else, but 99% of my browsing is through the recent topics rather than just the clicking into each forum.

 

I also 100% love the alerts. It's great.

I'd really like to see two things. A TS3 server tracker. So that you can check on the website who is in TS / the different channels, and a calender for events.

 

The shoutbox has brought us together more than anything else, it has to stay

 

I agree with the Recent Threads bit. Unfortunately it's a 50/50 thing. It's great for keeping ontop of threads that are current, but sometimes decent threads get buried if they're not replied to fast enough, falling off the recent threads module.

On the other hand though, the shoutbox is something I enjoy. It's a good quick way for the group to chat and if it weren't for it, we'd see a lot of silly, threads that just take up database space.

 

I will work on getting us a TS3 tracker. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. Unfortunately there are no good modules for Xenforo to support it. Hopefully with phpbb we'll have more flexibility there.

We currently have a calendar in place but it isn't used frequently.

 

Aha, so you do. I guess I didn't look hard enough.

 

Yeah I agree about the threads getting buried, that's why I'd say expand it so that more recent threads are visible, because if it falls off the recent list, its pretty much buried regardless.

 

In order I check Alerts, Inbox, and Recent Threads on the main page. Then I start browsing the forums to see if there is anything I missed. While I don't use the Shoutbox I agree that keeping it is a good idea to reduce the clutter on the forum threads from all the little one off and misc stuff that seems to hit the Shoutbox.

The Calendar and Events are certainly worth keeping.

I think reducing the "news" blurbs in favor of other items (Events and Recent Threads come immediately to mind) would be beneficial.