Forum Recommendations

Earthhorse

boards has a lot of forums. At the last count there was around five hundred thousand billion of them and half them were just to cover the Dublin post codes.

It can be hard to find your way around if you're new or hard to realise new forums have been made if you're old. Okay, you can check the New Forums dropdown or keep an eye on the Forums forum but it's not a very efficient way of doing it.

I think it would be pretty cool if there were a "Recommend Forums" feature on boards similar to the suggested friends feature on Facebook. I know that might be a bit Web 2.0 for some people's blood but I think it could work.

Basically it would look at your existing subbed forums and, based on analysing sitewide subbed data and seeing what other forums people with a subbed list similar to yours have, but which you don't, and recommend based on that. Alternatively, you could have a little table in the background saying this forum is like that forum, that forum and that forum e.g. Humanites is like Expand Your Horizons, Politics and Philosophy* or a combination of both.

Anyway, I think it would be a good way to discover new forums. Actually, it could also work by comparing against your Friends subbed list on the assumption that you will have similar tastes to them.

*Before anyone picks me up on this, it is just an example for illustration purposes only and is not meant to represent actual similarities between any forums, living or dead.

Ross

It's actually an idea we've kicked around once or twice; doing it right is fiddly, so we've put off investigating it further while we concentrate on the backend.

Earthhorse

Cool.