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Posted by Dave on August 15, 2007 at 1:50:59 pm EDT
In reply to suggestion for forum software posted by bheiser1 on August 14, 2007 at 6:41:28 pm EDT

Thanks for taking the time to put together these suggestions. To answer your first question, yes, nearly everything you see on Traispace, including the forum software, is home-grown.

Several years ago we considered switching to a commercial or open source package for the forums, but ultimately found that none of them were going to allow us to do all the things we wanted to. While it's not obvious on the front end, the forum software is pretty tightly tied into other parts of the site, including the gear reviews, blog, news articles, etc.

Although we haven't (yet) taken full advantage of it in terms of features available on the site, the backend databases have been designed to facilitate rich connections between related content. So, for example, your forum post about choosing a stove could eventually be automatically linked to reviews, specs, and descriptions of the stoves people have mentioned. Likewise, product detail pages could link back to relevant discussions in the forum. (A lot of valuable discussion currently gets somewhat lost and forgotten once it's pushed of the first page of the forum.) Those are the sort of things that we wouldn't be able to do with something like vBulletin, and we'd also be stuck with a lot of overhead for features that we don't necessarily want of need.

So, we've forgone some forum bells and whistles and significant ease of development in order to create a purpose-built system that will ultimately provide a richer, more integrated and purpose-specific experience than some piece of off-the-shelf software.

You mentioned email and pictures. Email notifications is something I'll be working on as soon as we get the newsletter done this afternoon, and picture-posting in some form is on the list as well. We're planning to make major upgrades this fall to the forums and other user-centric features (such as picture posting, email alerts, rss feeds, enhanced user profiles, etc.) If you have additional feature requests -- e.g. features from vBulletin that you'd find useful here -- definitely let us know, either here or in Alicia's recent call for ideas: http://www.trailspace.com/forums/feedback/topics/39310.html

I'd also love to hear any thoughts you might have about how to increase participation by a broader cross-section of the user base.

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