Hi All, so a Forum module is top of the uservoice list for Orchard, and I have made a lot of progress in building one. Before I release, I would like your suggestions on what you would like in the Forum module that I may have overlooked

What do we already have?

- CRUD Forum, Thread, Post
- Navigation in forums, threads, and posts
- Open/Close Threads with message
- Ability to change to HTML, Markdown etc (Not using BodyPart) 
- Quick Reply to Post
- Reply to Post page which allows you to extend what a user can do
- Categories and Tags at a Thread level (this includes default ones)
- Framework for Popularity Algorithm. (I have written a sample SO one)

Things I conciser out of scope...

- Moderation (will be part of a recipe with 1.7 based on WorkFlow) 
- Users can sign-in using Facebook / Twitter accounts and/or custom single sign-on with your site.   (Can already do with with the Open Authentication Module)
- Built-in search engine (Lucene.NET) - (Implemented in core, just need to switch it on)

My current backlog...

- Rss feeds
- Fast quoting 
- Role based forums 

What suggestions do you the community have?

What should be "Out Of The Box" within a Forum Module? 

Do you have any radical/concept idea's?

yaf is a good source for what we could expect from a forum.

Nice! A very nice asset to the Orchard Community.

Some features I would appreciate in the forum, if more radical features might come to mind I will share them with you.

• User growth management. (Measure amount of posts to grant more privileges by obtaining a higher user title or role)
• Share posts on twitter/facebook..
• Advanced skinning options.
• Possibility for admin to add bannersspace/addsense in the forum

cartago wrote:

• Possibility for admin to add bannersspace/addsense in the forum

I don't think this should be a feature in the forum module. This would better fit in a general "addsense" module, which would allow you to put addsense on any page, not just forum pages.

One thing I would like to see in the forums is the possibility to create forums and categories. Now you can only create forums and inside those, the threads will be created. But I'd like extra dept, so that I could create a structure like this:

Hardware
 - Graphic cards
 ---- Thread: Help! my graphic card is broken!
 - Sound cards 
 ---- Thread: What is a good sound card to buy? 
 - CPUs
 ---- Thread: How do I overclock my CPU?
Software
 - Operating systems
 ---- Thread: Help, my Windows won't boot!
 - Security software
 ---- Thread: What is a good free antivirus? 

Do you need nested Forums? Or would you see this as more of Forum Categories?

The latter, I would see it more as forum categories, not nested forums. Like the following example:

http://gathering.tweakers.net/

Categories is better, but I wonder if handling hierarchies of categories is necessary. I can't find an example which forum hierarchies, and I am afraid being able to handle hierarchies would just result in a complexification of the theming story.

I tend to agree. I think Categories and Tags on a Forum are good enough for the time being. If there is a demand for multiple category levels then we can revisit that story later.

And taxonomies would work fine for that if you can make them work on the front-end (don't see why not).