What do you look for in forum software?

[Owen]

I'm currently developing some forum software, and I was wondering what you use most and would like most in yours?

Iv'e currently got the following features

Posting (Obviously...)
Admin control
Permissions
SEO friendly URLs
Flexible messgae group system (More on that below)


I currently have this on the cards

Report this post, banning
Moderator CP, editing other's posts
Editting own posts
Post versioning (So you can see previous unedited versions, with options for admins to say whether or not you can hide old versions etc


(Edit 4: The reason I haven't done these yet is I'm lazy! :P

So, I have two things to ask:

What features of your forum software (Which I haven't mentioned here) do you use most?
Which features do you wish your forum software had?


About the message groups feature
Message groups can allow you to create a forum which acts like any other. For example, you can have the following mapping:

(Forum) Forum Announcements --> (Group) Forum Announcements


Or, you could have the following mapping:

(Forum) Forum Announcements --> (Group) Forum Announcements
--> (Group) Outage Announcements
--> (Group) Network-wide notices


Also, using plugins, you can redirect message groups to other backends. One example here is RSS.

Finally, you can use groups to make a forum look more active. If your forums overlap on one or more topic (The lounge for example) then you can have all forums share the same lounge. Which could be bad of course if you had all your forums as active as iNets... Imagine how quickly posts would dissappear of the lounge front page :P

So, any thoughts or comments? You can see me running the latest internal release at http://forums.humgun.com

(Edit: GAH! Ive added a bug somewhere in the support framework underneath the forum software! Ill fix it ASAP and notify you)
(Edit 2: Ok, the problem isn't as bad as I thought it was. Just note that those 0s that are in bad places in the page aren't supposed to be there...)
(Edit 3: YAY! The problem is gone!)

[SoftWareRevue]

What features of your forum software (Which I haven't mentioned here) do you use most? Searching. :)

Which features do you wish your forum software had?A built in warning system.



Tell me more about your admin backend. Because the admin controls are pretty high on the list for me when considering a forum software.

[Owen]

The entire forum software is built upon a system I've named ServiX. Thats what keeps the URLs looking good, manages the users, etcetra. It's a "light" layer - It's not a CMS. So it doesn't Nuke-ize your site.

Anyway, my plan for it (The current backend is temporary :)) is that down the left, you will have categories of options (Example: Site, Users, Forums, Blogs, etc), which will normally have their contents hidden. Clicking one opens it up and shows it's links (Example: Manage Forums, Manage User Groups, Manage Message Groups, etc)

Pretty like most other forum software then - It's tried and tested. Just this time page loading is via AJAX :)

Oh, and search will be whole site. The forum software will supply a plugin to it so it can index forum posts :)

Hmm, Warning system. Adds to to-do list!

Added:
Oh yeah, I have RSS and OPML export in it to :)

[D'Godown]

Just put in all features of VB and IPB, Crawl both websites of these softwares and you will get to know what users need.