What do you think makes the perfect community? A nice design? Community-feel? Features? Information? As a member of forums and communities, what do you value the most?
I must say the design on the site is pretty important for me but I can live with an bad design if other things like people, staff and features is good.
A sense of community - there's no question about it. In order for an online community to truly succeed (or in other words, achieve the "perfect forum" status), the following qualities and/or items are needed: A dedicated staff team who is truly passionate about what they do and what their forum is about. A supportive and active memberbase that will not only take part in the discussion being held within the community, but also assist in improving upon the "lacking" aspects of the forum. A never-ending, continuous flow of fresh content. While the visual appearance of a forum may be important, it is certainly not the most important.
Great users, great staff team, wonderful sense of community, activity, the design and the differences from other forums in the same niche.
I'm going to go with "sense of community", also. People are finding it harder and harder to connect on a personal level with others these days, so if they're scoping out forums to join they're going to join the one where they think they'll make some friends.
a perfect forum would be ☺ friendly members and staff ☺ quite active ☺ good layout (easy to read, nice design...) ☺ interesting threads
Agreed Good staff with a sense of humour and who don't dish out the craziest infractions like one site I could mention. A friendly and helpful community also goes a long way. Spammers getting dealt with and those who report them to mods/admins not getting penalised for trying to help is also nice.
