I use about 3 or 4 forums, but to check my activity I have to go on each individually. Someone can’t browse my posts at one forum on another. I can’t browse someone’s posts on one forum on another. There isn’t a shared log-in. It’s a bit silly.
The fact every forum is so contained in itself definitely creates community, but from a social point of view linking them together more would surely be beneficial.
Linking them together would have several advantages: users could find other forums, friendships could be maintained across forums and it’d be much better than having to Google someone and then guess if it’s the same person.
It’s amazing sites like Disqus haven’t existed for years for forums!
A brief post, I know, but I’m sure there’ll be lots of opinions. Why hasn’t Web 2.0 hit forums yet?
This is one more place where OpenID could really shine. But it comes down to forum software vendors supporting the standard.
This is a very valid point your making.
I’ve google’d abit but can’t find any current products on the market yet.
Some forum software supports RSS feeds, and if one can grab the RSS feeds a developer can maybe intelligently go and distiguish usernames etc.
This could be a good idea for some new plugin to post that to twitter or other social networks as well.
I guess, the main reason is simply competition coupled by lack of availability of a service / software that will do so.
It would be good to see this inbuilt in a forum software.
Good question Joe. As a user of many different types of forum it would be so useful to be able to access them all. What would be extra good is if you could cluster them, so if you have a tech-related post you could post it only on your five tech forums, etc etc
As one of your other commenters mentions, something like OpenID could help, but I guess a lot of the forum framework software is relatively old and fairly stable.
Valid point, but if some forums are going to implement cross-forum-communities, they’ve to sit down and draw the boundaries and the business perspective to make it worth while to lead traffic away from each forums..
But, as Jenna Fox comments, OpenID is a brilliant way to connect the forums through a single logon id. IPB 3.0beta (invision power board forums) supports OpenID, so it seems that some of the forums has pondered on some of the issues mentioned in this article
I suppose the question is, are forum communities homogeneous enough to withstand multiple posting with all the lack of context that might imply?
There are several services that let you post to blogs / microblogs simultaneously, but there is much less of a reliance of conversation in those instances. Forums are entirely dependent on post-to-post responses, and I’m not sure that someone shouting stuff in isolation is really what’s required
I think Disqus is going to be the next best thing in commenting. It’s great at stopping spam!