My post failed Captcha with no opportunity to re-certify. Fortunately, I composed it in a text editor.

One of the big reasons I joined GT rather than other guitar instruction sites was the promise of an active forum. As a member of a number of forums, I expected a much better platform. While I would not say that the GT forum sucks, it is absolutely not what I expected and is inferior to every other forum of which I am a member. Ben Martin excused the quality of the forum with "a very small team". How much of a team does it take to review available forum software to make sure it includes all desired features? I web searched forum software . The first site I checked... hostinger(.)com asked the question, "What Features Should the Best Forum Software Include?" They answered their own question thusly, before making any recommendations...

[br]Profile customization. Enabling users to customize their profiles can increase engagement since it makes them feel more at home and in control.

[br]A powerful text editor. Forums are almost 100% text-based, so you’ll want to offer your users a robust editor to create and customize their posts.

[br]Private messaging. Many forums are all about public discussion, but enabling private messaging is a smart way to foster interpersonal relationships.

[br]Comment signatures. Just like profile customization, this option can help you increase engagement and gives users the chance to have a little fun.

[br]Achievement systems. A lot of forums set up user ‘levels’ that can be unlocked after a certain level of activity or amount of time. It rewards users for participating in your forum frequently.

[br]A couple of missing features to add. When you select a topic, the topic should be displayed at the user's last read comment (Very annoying to have to manually jump to your last read comment), not a big deal to set a browser cookie, and should not increment the topic every time the OP checks it, skewing the number of views. Knowing that there is forum software available that meets these requirements as well as every suggestion that JJ90 made, I think it is weak tea to say, "We have a very small team", rather than admit ,"We chose the wrong package, and we don't want to correct it". Regardles of how old the original post is, many of those issues remain valid.