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Amy started a vivid discussion about how much modern day forum software is of the rather deprecated side of software evolution. She noted StackOverflow as being an unwanted bastard between Yahoo! Answers and Digg. And she’s right with her critique but so far the discussion hasn’t offered any visions for a new generation of forum software. After having read through this tremendous amount of comments and blog posts I’d like to sketch a few ideas that I’ll implement in a forum to be started very soon.

Harald understands a forum as “mankind’s need to meet and communicate is as old as it’s habit to form tribes” and this is exactly where forum software has to be evolved back to. You have a tribe, in modern internets represented by a website, and you have those speaking up, the 1% of internet users contributing to our digital and accessible knowledge. There are absolutely no necessities to introduce static elements like categories or threads or even sub-threads. What the user wants do is to speak. Either speak out and hope for someone to reply, or the other way round reply to someone or join a group of users discussing a certain topic. The whole idea of a forum is an open space without any borders between discussions.

If the user speaks and no one replies, sad, but those words will be lost very soon. If someone replies then a discussion is started and other users who are friend with those two, or write about a similar topic, will be informed and asked wether they want to contribute something. This can be a few more words or paragraphs, or a link to a previous discussion. It might be even possible to include whole or parts of other discussions.

After a while the forum software will be able recognise little groups of people. Tribesmen who are always standing out at the same corner of the forum, discussing about the the same type of problems. Those groups should be granted a corner of the forum to be maintained and extended by themselfs. There they could e.g. put important discussions on a wall, or write their common knowledge into a book and put it into the library’s shelf. Those group sites won’t resemble a list view in any existing forum software, and yet won’t they be the sum each member’s personal profile, but should be thought of as a blackboard or monthly newsletter by your local “goths pro choice” group.

In a nutshell: Start to write, if someone replies it will grow and if you stick to your topic you will join a group