There are probably 6 or 7 other sites where I check out message boards on a fairly regular basis, but this one is, by far, the best. I've found most others have just *way* too many features--you get to pick your own avatar, thousands of smilies, a fancy signature, etc. It's really kind of annoying (to me) to have to scroll through all that crap. I really like that this one is so clean and easy to follow.
One thing that I have seen that is very helpful is on
www.disboards.com. On there, when you float your mouse over the topic of the header message, it will show you the first couple of lines of the message so you can see what it is about without opening it. It's sort of like what "Today's Active Topics" on this board says, but you can see it in the list of messages. (Hope this makes sense!) It's nice to have something like that when you have a huge volume of messages, with title lines that are less than helpful.
I also like the PM (private message) function that a lot of boards have. I really miss the easy "click and email" functionality we used to have on here. Losing that hasn't prevented me from emailing people or telling them to email me; I'm always happy to share. But it has contributed to cluttering the boards with lots of "can you send me that too?" emails.
It seems like the "useful resources" and "FAQ" sections of this site often get overlooked by newcomers. I'm not sure why, but it would be nice if those two sections were made more prominent somehow.
I've tried the search feature here (just on the forums) a couple of times and found it to be a little quirky, but I don't know of a site that does it better.
Besides the forum, I **LOVE** the blog--like having my own personal clipping service. I can't tell you how many times I've forwarded articles to my peers.
