Forums. An Utter Mess.

Forums. Forums are a mess. Design-wise, forums are complete and utter shit.

Yet I love them.

One forum I spend a fair bit of time on is the Industrial Craft 2 forum. It looks like shit, has poor navigation, terrible iconography and typography, and the color palate was created by a blind man.

But I fucking love that website. #

The community is what makes forums great. Without a deep integrated community, both passionate and knowledgeable about a subject at the same time, a forum is worthless. The Industrial Craft 2 forum may look like shit but it certainly doesn’t feel so. In a world where many “mainstream consumers” and users of the internet are unaware of the deep power of the forum, it is places like the (the common abbreviation is IC2) Industrial Craft 2 forum shines.

It isn’t unique. In many places, the forum still shines, a great hub for communities of often-nerdy people full of great ideas, questions, and knowledge. Forums can convey concepts, news, help, or just simple and friendly discussion. They also spawn hate, but that shit is for later.

Back on track now. The community around the IC2 forum is deep and awesome, making it a fantastic place to visit, but if one were to go and attempt to fix it, how would it be done? What design decisions would be necessary to fix the forum, to enhance it and bring it forth in the modern world of beautiful web design. Other than the fact that the software that the IC2 forum runs on is OLD AS FUCK, and newer versions are available of course.

This article is about how to redesign a forum, in this case a great and well-developed forum with a lot of content and a great community, for the modern world. Let us dive right in.

1. Forums suck. #

WIP

2. “Flat” design. #

WIP

3. Clean. What is clean? #

WIP

4. The existing content. #

WIP

5. The Original Post. #

WIP

6. The average-joe post #

WIP

7. The post-er #

WIP

8. Thread design. #

WIP

9. Category and organization. #

WIP

10. Forum elements. #

WIP

What does all this mean? #

WIP