Missing Features

The FogCreek Software support forums are a refreshing example of how to build successful software by focusing your implementation on a fundamental rethink of how the software work flow should work.

The FogCreek support forums are great, but they aren’t quite complete. They lack an easy way to attach a screen shot, provide no simple method to cross link posts and lack proper CAPTCHA (to protect against spam). Ironically enough, FogCreek’s bug tracking software FogBugz contains most of what the support forums lack.

So your correspondent took Joel Splotsky’s outstanding post on discussion forums (your correspondant can’t find the right post anywhere) as a direct challenge: build a better support forum.

So your correspondent started this development process by ripping off being inspired by the FogCreek approach to forums, with a few added twists like automatic post linking, automatic URL linking and mathematical CAPTHCA.

A demo of version 0.5 is online:
http://missingfeatures.com/betterforumsdemo/

As of today, this posted version lays the groundwork for a different approach to support forums. By next Friday (hopefully) your correspondent will post several new features to this nascent project that will fully demonstrate the concept.

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