Future of the footy forum

[mateinone]

Hi Spanner

On the surface I do like the look of a couple of those forums.
I particularly like how the last 2 seem to have reasonably seamless integration into Social Media.

The 2nd one you need to inject the blocks of code, but it seems pretty straight forward

EB has talked about walking away if further integration with Social Media and everyone has a choice, but I don't understand that at all. Integrating with social media doesn't mean turning the site into Facebook or the like, it means using those sites to drive more traffic and hitting audiences that may not otherwise know of the forum. Personally I would think that is a positive thing.
Also just enabling SSO. It is less passwords for people to remember or save for those that want to use their other tools to log into the site and for those that don't, well that is okay also.

For example if someone likes and shares a post on Facebook, that doesn't alter the discussion on the forum at all, it just let's others know about the discussion.

I liked that the last one on Spanner's list allowed for code to be injected, which gives a lot of options for implementing widgets tools over time, simple tools perhaps showing when a player is coming up for an anniversary match or links into stories in the media etc.

I also like that it had options for tags. you could tag a poster or tag say a player. When looking for stories on Murphy (for example) you could click on the tag for Murphy and go to all stories where he is tagged. Looking at avenues to move a site forward doesn't mean the current site isn't good or doesn't server a purpose, not at all. It is just saying... the IT world has changed astronomically in the last 5-10 years, should we be looking at what else we can do?

I admit I am firmly in the basket of wishing there was some change, but that doesn't mean I don't think Spanner & the mods have done a brilliant job here, because they have