I'm making a thread because I'd like GOG to have opinions on the subject of a potential forum overhaul from more than 6 members of the community (by the way I respect all members who came forward and said they were meeting GOG to offer feedback. What am I talking about?). Simply post what features you'd like or wouldn't like to see on the forums and give an explanation of the pros and / or cons you see in implementing them. I'll try to keep a list of said features with pros and cons about them.

Edit: I now realize keeping a list of the features and their pros and cons would be a nightmare and could represent what people wrote incorrectly. So I won't be doing that.

I might be relatively unique, in that I actually have a fairly positive view of the current forum software. HTML escaping bugs and messed up links and such are annoying and should be fixed, and I wish replying was just done with a textarea beneath the thread instead of in a new window - but I love the tight integration with notifications, think the quoting system works pretty well, and am very much in favour of the text only ethic of it all.

New forum must haves:
* No signatures
* No inline images
* No graphical emoticons
* Continued notification system
* No vBulletin or other major off-the-shelf forum software which will be hacked before the year is over due to its ubiquity making it such an easy and attractive target.

Wishlist:
* Option to disable post merging for mafia players. :)
* Resizable textarea instead of new window for replying
* List formatting?
* Better search function, with ability to list all posts by a member within a thread, within a forum, or globally.

Not to sound pessimistic, but...isn't this kind of what we've been doing for the last few years, now? I could swear I remember at least 2 or 3 threads cropping up like this before. Pretty sure I even made one of 'em and had to close it down after the thing fell to political infighting.

Got me curious since I work with a number of them. What are you suggesting?

I know I would rather see something off the shelf as it means it's consistently being worked on. I know with the webhosting we do, if a security release is made on any of the software we support, it's rolled out to clients via SVN no later than 6 hours afterwards. (We do all the updating ourselves and send in our own patches and security notices when we have them.)

Most hacking is done when stuff doesn't get upgraded.

These were our suggestion as well so they are aware of those.

Yep. And most upgrading gets difficult to impossible if you've customized the software to do anything worthwhile, like integrating well with the rest of your site. So you can either have a bog standard non-integrated forum, which has to be upgraded regularly, and will frequently bring new features no one asked for and might not have appropriate options to disable, or you get someone security-aware to write something custom that does exactly what you need, and no more, and live happily ever after.

(Probably worth spinning this off to a new thread if you or anyone else feels the desire to go deeper into this discussion.)

Don't give up hope, zeo. If first you don't succeed .... ;)

I politely disagree with that but I'm not going to sit here and write for an hour about how we have our company setup and how we push out the software to clients.

You can do custom work on software without modifying the core software. The specific method depends on the software you're discussing.

We host 7200 clients and we do all of the installs, upgrades, security fixes, backups and custom work for their websites. All the software comes off a central SVN server that we have offsite. Changes are made at the local level and again the method depends on the software. Some are as simple as css changes stored in the website's database. Some are a custom theme delivered via code in a file stored outside of the install.

edit: You don't do modifications to core files. No need to.

... destroy all evidence that you even tried. At least, that is what I heard. ;)

I agree with the text only ethic. The con is that less personality from forum members is shared, the pro is its easier to read and find information without scrolling forever to get to it.

I also agree with the search function and the ability to get all posts from a member. The con of having all posts is trolling and abusive behavior (following someone in all threads they posted in and trolling them), but it would make it easier to find posts you know someone wrote but forgot where and when.

I'll also echo The Magnificient Six? The Mighty 6? Them 6 dudes, in saying I'd like for the reputation to be gone. For me there's no pro and plenty of cons, it's abused to no end. Yeah, I did think about the fact there's been a lot of talk already in the forum about the subject, and also that there are wishlists probably for some of the things that will be suggested. I'm not sure if there ever was confirmation they were indeed looking to change the forum before. I do think though that it's always good to give all the members of a community the chance to voice whatever they are hopeful to see replace something they use or might use. If you (a general you) find this has been discussed to death, feel free to lurk or not participate. The thread will die then.

What I would like:
* A way to report posts that break the terms of service other than just messaging the community manager
* Option to jump to last unread post in a thread, even if the thread has multiple pages since then
* Option to remove topics from "recent posts" on the main forum page
* Option to jump to specific pages on main forum page
* An icon, similar to the GOG employee icon, to indicate if a Developer has posted in a topic
* A fast way to see the topics you've posted in (currently, the "forum replies" page is really slow if you've been at all active on the forums)
* Maybe a way to view the edit history of an edited post?

* What I would not like:
* Any option that would allow autoplaying animations of any sort
* Any option that would allow autoplaying sound
* A way for groups of users to delete a topic without mod/admin intervention (it's currently possible thanks to the "report as spam" link)
* The reputation system, at least in its current form (there are good users with low or negative Rep, and I can think of at least one bad user (who I will not name here) with over 4,000 Rep)

Wants :
---------
*A "Preview post" feature (Unless it already exists, and I've been missing it the whole time).
*Bigger avatars.
*Better support for mobile phones, text is tiny when I use my phone, and when I zoom-in, the control panel gets in the way.
*More skins/color schemes, not a high priority, but it'd be nice.
*Split the "General discussion" into more sub-forums.

How about those 6 guys who just had a bit of luck. I consider myself neither mighty nor magnificient or anything like that. Everybody active here in the forum could have been picked and who knows mabe we were second or third choice after others could not participate for whatever reason? I know this is off topic but it was important for me to mention this since I really don't want to be anything other than part of this community I like so much.

So let's continue with the forum suggestions then :)

Just didn't remember exactly what some people dubbed you in the other thread and decided to have some fun, but yeah to me you're more "them 6 dudes".

Maybe so, but that halo doesn't help people think otherwise.

And why do trumpets blare whenever you enter a room? It's annoying!