What makes a photography forum special for you?

I don't know. I think the forum format is better than the comments format for my users. Especially as it leads to multiple people participating, multiple POVs, multiple experiences, and that's better than just me pontificating. Surely that's better for users too... and no I absolutely don't have world domination expectations. But I think it's worth trying it out, giving it a shot. There are lots of reasons not to try something. It's easy to think it'd be too expensive, or not busy 'enough'. But cmon if everyone thought like that we'd never get anywhere :).

Many thanks for the inputs. if this thread could get back on topic and if people could talk about things they like, and would like to see, that'd be great.
 
OK been thinking about this some more. Johan, I'm guessing this is also going to be primarily a bug based site (I know there will be stuff on there useful for macro in general, but I suspect the largest percentage of users would be bug shooters). As a bug shooter you actually get 2 hobbies in one, photography an entomology and one of the features that really helped me out initially was Flickr's "notes" functionality. Experts could highlight specific areas of one of my images and add comments (highlighting key body parts or other interesting features). Sadly, with the big update Flickr removed this functionality and it doesn't seem likely to come back any time soon. Could you implement something similar? It's a great way to teach/learn and maybe you could include some kind of toggle to display or hide the notes. Another option might be to add some kind of overlay, so you can maybe draw over an image (draw on arrows or circle areas) which just opens up more options. A good way to implement it might be to have notes visible on a "per user" basis, and you can click through a list of each user who has left notes to show them one by one, a "show all" option and a hide all option.

Would it also be possible to give the original poster control of stopping comments on a thread they start? I'm thinking here of a user creating say a tutorial that might want to publish, but have some follow up posts so don't want to open it up to comments immediately (alternatively a "dratt" status for posts that are only visible to the OP could work here).

I'm sure I came up with some more ideas, but I've forgotten them now, so I may be back if I can remember them ;)
 
Maybe go with something like http://vanillaforums.org/, with the latest discussions as the home page so you end up with something like this:

http://lowendtalk.com/ (with a nicer layout)

So that way you end up with all the latest discussions in one area,. So there is always a decent number of discussions on there, even if you do not get tons of visitors. It will look there is more activity on first glance due to here being a number of topics pushed straight in their face. Whereas the traditional forum layout would look dead.
 
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