The biggest elephant in the room with forumside communications has always been "our ability to modify and customize the forums to do cool new things is handicapped because it's a total kludge job that the game and forum can even talk to one another." The good news is one of the major projects that has been in the works for awhile now has been constructing an entirely new forum system that is custom-built to work with the game, instead of trying to ram the square peg of a pre-built forum package into the round hole that is Nationstates. Once that new system is in place, we'll be able to tweak the forums to do cool new stuff with much greater ease than what we currently have.
In the meantime, I'd like to use this thread to collect a sort of "feature wishlist" for a new forum system. There will likely also be crossover with gameside communications, as the tentative plan for the new forum would basically remove the forumside/gameside divide entirely, and also increase the functionality of RMBs to make them more forum-like. Kat and I will possibly have to sit down and get a dedicated development thread going just for RMB upgrades in the not too distant future as well.
New forums feature wishlist:
Forum features needing more discussion/links to their specific discussion threads:
- New forum's formatting code:
- What code effects are desired? What should be avoided?
- Restricting use of particular codes? EX: Warn tag only works for mods. But are there any other visual formatting effects that should be limited by forum?
- Post/thread "likes" or other reacts:
- Should we even HAVE likes/reacts?
- Should likes apply to threads, or individual posts?
- What about upvotes/downvotes like exists for Dispatches?
- Should we have a variety of "reacts" such as thumbs up/down, hearts, etc a la Facebook?
- Potential areas for abuse (like-spamming/notification spamming and harassment), and ways to mitigate it. (EX: Players get a limited number of reacts per day?)
- Thread tags:
- Apply to specific forums such as RP or to all forums? Or have specific tags only available to specific forums (for instance IC/OOC available to RP forums but not NSG.)
- What tags would be most useful?
- Should there be an upper limit on number of tags, or restriction to prevent use of conflicting tags?
- Foe lists:
- Hides quotes by the Foe'd user as well?
- Merely hides posts by the Foe'd user, but the hidden post can still be clicked to view like it currently works, or posts by Foe'd user are completely invisible to the Foe-ing party (similar to how FB blocking does it)?
- API integration:
- What information should be available via API? What's useful?
- What functions, if any, should scripts be able to perform via the API?
- Subforum-specific bans:
- Would these actually be useful?
- Subforum bans vs full-forum bans in practical application (how often do we really need to bar somebody just from a specific subforum?)
- Should permanently applying a subforum-only ban be an option on the table? When might this be practical?
- Should players be able to request to be banned from a specific subforum? (EX: Player is aware they get worked up into a rulebreaking rage any time they stick their nose into NSG, and requests to be blocked from accessing it.)
- Heck, related to the above, would it be useful to give players the option to hide specific subforums from their view?
Some of these will no doubt merit their own dedicated discussion threads to really go into specifics on the feature; if someone would like to get a discussion going on one, please feel free and drop me a link so I can update this post as our sort of master index. Likewise, if you would like to start a thread for a new forum feature that isn't already on the list, go ahead and just let me know here so I can add it to the list above.