One of the common features on forum is called the moderated forum.  This type of forum allows users to create posts but those posts don’t appear until a moderator has a chance to read through them and then approve them.  Non approved posts are usually deleted.

While thinking about this type of functionality, I thought of a cool way to create very interesting work flows on the forums.  As new posts are created and then approved, they move through a series of different forums until they end up at their destination.  So for each forum you can set it to be moderated and then choose the destination forum for new content.   So if you create a new post in a moderated forum, it is moved to the forum you setup as the destination.  Then when the post is approved, it is moved to the next destination.

Lets say I have five forums: Bugs,  Bug Reports – Bug Confirmed – Bug Fixed – Bug Tested – Bug Killed.   When I create a new post in Bugs, it automatically moves to Bug Reports and awaits moderation.  A moderator reads it and then clicks the approve button.  This post now moves to Bug Confirmed.  Then another moderator does his thing and then click approve and the post moves to Bug Fixed.  When the process is done, the bug entry ends up at the Bug Killed forum.  What is nice about this process is that you can have some of the forums set to private so they are hidden from other users, you can control security on each forum so that only certain people can work with posts in certain forums. 

I think a feature like this would have a lot of good use scenarios and it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to implement.

We upgraded our own forums to Ideal BB.NET 3.1.6 RC1.  The new version of Ideal BB.NET is now running on the .NET 2.0 framework.  There are some new features including the ability to upload an avatar, and the active posts section which highlights the most active topics based on the number of replies they’ve received.

This build is a release candidate meaning that we are hoping to release this build as the final in a few weeks so feel free to browse through it and post a few sample topics.  If you find any issues, please report them to us by using the contact us page.  (www.idealscience.com/site/about/contact.aspx).

Bungie Studios, a division of Microsoft, launched a new version of their web site that contains a revamped version of their forums which is powered by Ideal BB.NET.  Their forums have over 10 million posts spread across 12 public forums.  There are also private forums on about 450,000 boards, one for each fan club. 

The revamped forums have a new look and several new features.  Members are already raving about them saying that they are cleaner, run faster, and are more user friendly.

The new forums can be seen here.