There are tons of css/website showcases but i've never seen one for forum designs. Has anyone seen a website/article along these lines?

Alternatively are there any really well designed forums that you just think wow....

Looking for inspiration and best practices here

It's been discussed to some extent here; yet no one seems able to conjure a decent list of forum designs. Presumably because most designs are based on the awful vBulletin and PHPBB.

Kiwi wrote:Presumably because most designs are based on the awful vBulletin and PHPBB.

In all fairness Mike Lothar created the Nosebleed skin for PHPBB2 which I'm still fond of to this day, can't say I've ever appreciated PHPBB or vBulletin themselves mind

Still nothing special though is it? Bit of a shame really

It's a case of "a good design - for a PHPBB forum", but the creator has done a nice and solid job with what was available to him.

It's a shame forums don't get more attention, I guess they have so many usability and functionality considerations that people tend to stick to the same format.

I wonder if there was a showcase, would it encourage people to put more effort into forum design?

hayley wrote:It's a shame forums don't get more attention, I guess they have so many usability and functionality considerations that people tend to stick to the same format.

I wonder if there was a showcase, would it encourage people to put more effort into forum design?

Perhaps they rarely turn any profit worth spending the time on it. If they do end up getting popular, it's presumably impossible to redesign the entire infrastructure - unlike websites, there's a whole slew of things to carry over in a design transition - meaning that they can probably only perform incremental changes.

I'd like to see some mockups, though.

Plenty of choice on the forum softwares themselves, can't be too difficult to scrape together a few dozen incredible forum designs PHPBB, vBulletin, Simple Machines Forums, bbPress, Vanilla, PunBB, Fluxbb..... no doubt countless more. Unfortunately I'd expect the showcase would be flooded with spam-like submissions (Nosebleed with a new banner image, etc)

I tried using a Phpbb forum once before and it almost sent me insane..

Some good design ideas,tips,tricks and tuts at topsigsites.com

Rise!

I just got thinking about the Shoryuken forum. Even though it’s vBulletin (hsss!), it actually looks decent. I see that they’ve ditched a bunch of the default fonts, which has helped a lot. I guess it also helps that it consists of a community that don’t plaster every part of the threads with colourful fonts and obtrusive signatures.