NOTE: The whole point of the Development Updates forum is to bring potential site enhancements to the community to collect feedback. I can't guarantee every feature will be implemented or everyone's request will make it in, but I'll strive to include as much feedback as possible. If a feature makes it beyond the "idea" phase and I start working on it, I'll provide updates here, as necessary.

So the first idea is for enhancements around the forums. I built most of the forum functionality in an evening, so there are some features missing. Here are some possible enhancements (listed in no order):

• Sticky threads
• Provide an icon or something to indicate which threads have unread posts for you
• Provide more formatting hints (there are lots of things you can do with Markdown, which we're using, but I was lazy when providing the hints)
• Allow inline images (and maybe YouTube videos?)
• Add a new thread type for creating polls
• Show users that are currently "online" somewhere in the forums
• Provide a way to reply to a specific post
• Possibly make the Edit Post feature inline, rather than a modal / popup (thoughts on this? Could also do the same when creating a new thread.)

What do you guys think? Are any of these of interest to you? Do you have any other ideas? The difficulty and time required varies wildly in these items, so I don't necessarily have to tackle all of them at once.

To be honest (and this is part of the Development Updates process, right?!), I don't know if we have enough forum traffic right now to justify spending a ton of time on some of these features. But maybe these are features that could help get more people using the forums?

I think the forums are where they need to be at this point. If we had more interaction, I'd say do your worst and make these things really robust and versatile. The only thing that could be cool is private messaging between friends, but that's really not necessary either.

Adding some really needed feature to your forum-todo-list : searching :-)
It's getting more and more posts spanning multiple pages and some way of searching if there was any post or thread already done on some subject would be great.

I was thinking about the search feature the other day and how nice it would be :P

I think the easiest thing to do would be to have a textbox at the top-right corner of each forum page (i.e. the line where it says things like "Forums > Development Updates > Idea - Forum Enhancements "). If you enter text here and hit Enter (or maybe there's a button too), you would go to a separate search results page that would list all of the threads that matched the criteria. I could also have it to where it could display individual posts as well and link directly to those (this will required a bit more work since we don't have the anchors for them yet). As always, I plan to start with something simple and then we can expand upon it. Let me know if there's anything in particular you (or anyone else) would be interested in so I can keep that in mind when building it.

What about using the existing search box at the top to search the entire site for whatever is put in? Games, posts, stacks, articles, etc...?

Start with that simple idea and you got 95% covered I guess. An option to search all fora would also be nice :-)

I am not sure if I like the option jwcooley mentioned as your result would also be mix d and I really dislike that at e.g. GiantBomb. But perhaps there is some simple but brilliant solution to switch between 'search all' and 'search only games'.

You guys may have noticed, but we now have a forum search option :D I pushed it out in a sneaky update last night. It's extremely barebones for now. I just wanted to get something out the door since it had popped up a few times here recently.

Slick search option, love the placement.

I'm a fan.

Great work! I just found this sneaky post haha

I'm actually a big fan of the way the forums work as of now. I feel like there is enough customization to get your point across and to keep things looking clean. The only thing I would really like to see integrated is a "quote" button of sorts to better communicate one-on-one with users in threads. For now, I'm going to continue to use the markdown code for quoting until such feature is/ever becomes implemented.