Tom Cunnington
I am not an expert on websites or forums, but do help to administer one for a club and have been involved in the decisions about what products to use.
Most ‘forums’ are commercially available products, with a degree of customisation and integration. That’s why several of them look and behave the same. We did some looking around, and as you might expect the chepaer / free ones are very basic and frustrating to use – a real faff to attach pictures etc -and we even lost the contents of an embryonic forum with a simple wrong key stroke.
The ones we would probably most rate for usability are now priced accordingly – normally with monthly charges which mean that if you don’t pay, it disappears until you do – and they aren’t always that easy to integrate into the more common website products like WordPress (which we also use as it is fairly idiot proof and intuitive) ie using a seemless single registration and log-in
It would be for any management committee to decide whether the annual cost of a ‘better’ forum is a worthwhile use of members funds, alongside willing members to do the customisation / integration or a decision to pay someone to do it.
FWIW – I find this one easy enough to use – reactions would be nice but it’s simple to use and navigate and looks good on screen.
Tom