Re: 1.1 feature poll
“Joanna Average forum reader doesn’t care about any of that, and is probably keener on things like WYSYWYG, email, etc.”
This is a really excellent point, but you have to realise that “Joanna Average” doesn’t hang around on these forums, and so any suggestions of what the ‘average’ user wants – especially in terms of interactive functionality – is generally the poster projecting their own wishes.
There is also this great myth that the ‘average user’ is a tech savvy person, running JavaScript on a fast machine, who greatly enjoys a every feature out there. If you look at the trend of the internet over the past 15 years, almost all types of interactivity on the client-side or ‘feature requests’ become popular and then get phased to a small percentage real quickly.
“…private messaging, TinyMCE/rich text, topic views, Allow Images, Smilies, User Directory, Members Online, Related Topics, Reputation, Top Posters…”
The issue i have here mate, is that very few of these are essential to the running of a forum.
I use, and one or two other do two, something called E-mail as a private messaging system. My website, bless it – almost 14 years old now – has something called a Contact Form. I’m not sure that forums absolutely *need* another way of contacting people to function.
I don’t want to debunk your list, but given what you and timskii have said that we should redefine the categories we’re placing things into:
1) Features that are essential to administer a forum.
2) Features that are essential for users to use a forum.
3) Features that you’d like to see available to your forum.
4) Features that could be kind of cool.
5) Features that are useless.
BBpress development should, in my opinion, focus on Section 1 and then Section 2. Once we have a working stable and maintained version of BBpress, plugin developers will start to work on Sections 3 and 4. We know this because that’s how WordPress works, and its how BBpress was working about a year-18 months ago with version 0.9.
My issue is, while everyone’s opinion would vary, i don’t see many of the features you think should be included as standard being in Section 1 or 2. I understand that they may be features you want in t a forum as standard, or features that you think your users want as standard – and that’s totally cool – but lets focus on the features that both we (admins) and the users need as a minimum to use our forums effectively.
Just my two cents.
