[jasonmez]

Okay, first thing’s first… if this is the forum on the bbPress site itself, it really needs to be a bit more of a better example. As it is, when I get to the forum I’m first faced with a giant tagcloud, then I have to scroll all the way down past a huge list of posts to get to the actual individual forums such as this one. Of course, I could hit the button to start a new topic at the top of the top of the page but not only is that counterintuitive, it’s a really bad idea in general that will get people just Pcoming in and posting without looking at other posts first. I’d hoped the layout would have been changed by now at least.

Second problem, and this is one I’ve had on the wordpress forums as well but never bothered to ask about it. At the bottom of the post box it lists allowed tags (shortly after mentioning “Enter a few words (called tags)” with a link to the tagcloud rather than a definition of tags), but what gets me is “Put code in between backticks.” I’ve been running forums since before ISPs could offer residential Internet connections and yet I have absolutely no clue what that means. Unless this software is only meant for WordPress users (which I’m one of, btw), it would be best to get a bit more accessible to ordinary people in terms of language/jargon.

My other large beef is that the forums read like blog comments rather than forum discussions. Threading would be my number one request if I intended to use it. I guess my number two request would be integrating said threaded comments into the comments section of blog entries for those using it with a WP blog, though that’s a lot more complicated. I’d want to start off with the other way around by having the blog able to automatically display posts from certain sections such as Announcements and such. I’m not sure if that functionality exists yet, so apologies if it does. If not, I suppose a workaround could be reading the rss feed from that section into the blog section, but aggregating your own feeds is a fairly silly notion.

That’s it for initial feedback right now. I may come take another look when the software has matured a bit… by that I mean the core, it shouldn’t have to depend on plugins and themes to have very basic funcionality on its own.

Jason

Ps. Oh, and I’ve had strange issues logging in here on two seperate occasions.