[djeloso]

Which is a very good point. However, not everyone is using a forum-setup for the same reasons. Some may be doing it for a fan site, or just a community site, where usage is VERY important – if the community dies, then the forum dies.

However, other people are using it for a specific need. Its acting as a buffer between two sides to collect communication, whether its posted directly to the forum or sent in by email.

My specific need is a support forum. Sometimes a client can come to the forum and post their issue or review their design, or whatever. Other times, they are busy doing the rest of their day and want to just send an email off through thier blackberry while on the road.

It would be nice to reach more than one demographic and use a forum such as this for more than one reason.

[djeloso]

Because not ALL users will appreciate this. Some users will. But then, there are users who might not have email access (especially for a technical support forum like what I plan on using it for), so it obviously wouldn’t apply for EVERYONE. But, it would be a nice courtesy for those who it would fit in line with.

[djeloso]

I am in no way even considering using something like phpbb. I’ve had too many bad experiences with it.

What I am using my forum for (still looking to switch from Vanilla to BBPress possibly) is a support forum for a web design company. Each client has a specific category. Either, they are new clients that we are showing designs to or they are existing clients who sometimes have tech support questoins that require screen shots to be attached, or they want to upload pdfs, docs, fonts, etc to be used on the maintenance of thier site.

I’d love to see an attachments feature. It would help my decision of moving to this software.

[djeloso]

Both very good ideas. Thanks guys. Appreciate it.

[djeloso]

I’m looking for a way to make it so only administrators can see who is online. Can that be done easily?

[djeloso]

I would love this feature. Basically, we’re a small web design company that does a lot of communication between our design team and the client, as well as our technical support team and the client.

Right now, we’re using a different forum setup to function well, but not as well as we would like. THIS idea would be AWESOME for what we need.

Especially since we’re working with a lot of other smaller companies who can barely find their website using AOL let alone get used to a forum setup for their communication. If we could set it up so that they could read posts sent to their email and then respond to them via that email, it would make things a lot easier for them to get right into it.

Plus, all of the communication would also be stored in the one location (the forum) for us to access.

There is definite interest for this type of function, and I’d push for us to move from what we are using to bbpress if this was introduced.