A topic that has interested me lately is developing some great innovation for forums.  I know that many forum systems are being improved or even abandoned in favor of social networking sites.  However, forums are so prevalent I don't think they will ever truly disappear.  I believe they should be improved though.  No real changes have been made since their inception. 

Now, I am currently redesinging a community website I run, and my search for a new way to present forums for my users led me to some interesting topics:

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/show … hp?t=14299

http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/show … hp?p=82128

I have searched and searched through many other forums and web design communities for more information related to these two topics.  These seem to have some of the best information discussing innovating forum design. 

When I was originally looking for new forum software and stumbled on these articles, I cam across a system called Vanilla.  It has a very simplistic desing.  Out of the box, the forum labels all topics as Discussions and then ties each one to a pre-created category.  The most recent discussions are just listed on the initial page for the user to browse, and they actually have to go to a separate link to browse by Category instead of discussion.  A setup of this can be seen here: http://www.minionstudios.com/forums/.

This simple design was definitely different in comparison to say phpbb or IPB forums which are more traditional "category first" systems.  Here the conversations spilled out at you, similar to what many portals on forum systems use.  However, after a large number of conversations, this system could get really frustrating, and I could see myself skipping straight to categories to avoid the cacaphony of the initial Discussions page.

This idea for changing this led me to something I call branches.  If you read some of the theadminzone.com posts above, it's something touched on. Instead of focusing on the Discussion based focus in place of category first, I thought about fixing another problem forums seem to abound with: Derailing.  Ever found yourself starting a topic, then having it run away from you just a few posts later?  Or have you wanted to comment on something related to a topic but not related enough to post without sending the topic in a whole other direction(eg. a discussion about the Chronicles of Narnia movies leading into a Lord of the Rings movie comparison which leads into a discussion of the Lord of the Rings).  My idea was this was some way to branch a topic off without breaking a topic as most systems do now.  Instead of a Mod "splitting" a topic, a member would 'branch' the topic leaving the original topic in tact, but still keeping the two connected together.  Topics could have infinite branches and even branches could then be branched.  Of course, that would be based on software/hardware limitations, but this is theory after all.   

The reason I liked this idea is that it wouldn't interrupt the flow of conversation.  Other topics could be explored as in a real life conversation, but it would keep the conversation record in tact as seen in traditional computer-mediated discussions.  My ideas to track/create branches were the use of sophisticated tags, self-moderation, and outside moderation by other members or supervisors.  Automated splits would seem to be difficult to do software-wise.  General implementation of these branches into something outside the traditional linear discussions was also something I haven't quite figured out how to implement as far as visual design goes.

The exploration of this branching concept led me to something called semantic networking.

There is a post about 5 pages into the first link I mentioned at theadminzone.com that has a fantastic research paper about Semantic Networking.  I have provided a quick link where I hosted the file.  This is research into the idea about using semantic networks to aid in computer-mediated discussions.  The basic concept is to create Nodes which are 'concepts'.  Nodes that related to each other are linked.  Something similar to this in idea:



This is where things get troublesome for me.  Implementation, especially visual design become complicated when you start organizing information in this manner.  A forum with 10,000 threads would have 10,000+ Nodes if I am understanding the paper correctly.

Anyway, I am interested in what other people are talking about regarding forum information.  What can change for the better?  What needs to change if anything? What ideas do you have?