If you're here, you're either running a community or looking to get into the game of running a community. That implies use of (phpBB/SMF/MyBB/XenForo/Woltlab/Invision/insert other forum platform here), and possibly something or somethings alongside it (WordPress being my obvious suspect)
You probably encountered (and maybe still do encounter) things that frustrate you, that you can't do, or that you can do but it takes like 3x the effort you think it should.
I would love to hear what problems these are, in as much gory detail as you feel comfortable talking about - ideally what platform it is specifically, and if you have some workaround for it that gets you part way, I'd like to hear about that too.
What irks you about building your dream community (other than the other people, of course, can't fix that)?
It irks me no end that XF doesn't ship “ignore this node” out of the box. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a forum I read by scanning the list of boards, or by what’s new - I guarantee there are boards in there I don’t care about, and would appreciate filtering out by default from these views pushing them.
The recent debates over the new XF editor and the debates over Markdown in particular also illustrate a few pain points, I think:
1) the fact that some people need to have more comprehensive control over content creation than others, and trying to homogenise to a single platform wide editor is actually counterproductive (but so is trying to force consistency through everything being a forum topic). Maybe focus on adaptive tooling to suit the problem domain.
2) that people want to be able to do formatting easily without tripping up others over the magic incantations - easy to say personal preference but you still have to lead people to where they can set that preference and what the ramifications of it are - people inevitably do not want to have to care, especially as social media largely doesn’t permit formatting (and this is why).
3) limited account for the people who write content in a separate tool for whatever reason and then migrate that across (with more or fewer problems depending on the richness of that import)
