We’ve been debating for the last few months about the best way to get a forum on our site. We came to the conclusion that a forum should definitely be available to a music ranking site such as ours, as forums are the backbone of so many other music sites.  If our goal is to have people express their opinion on music, an open place to discuss such topics should be readily available.  Will people yell and scream and call each other bad names? Probably. Will they come back to our site and increase our page views and user base to check up on the status of their latest thread titled (e.g) “Why DMB = DUMB”? We hope so.

So we want a forum.  Great, let’s download phpBB and have it up in a few minutes.  Oh that’s right, we have an RoR site…okay, so let’s find the Rails equivalent.

Sadly, nothing easily integrated with our authentication system, and nothing screamed so loudly “I’ve got to have this! Look at all these amazing features!” that made us want to mod it to integrate well.  So I took the opportunity to create a custom forum from the ground up, and the starting block was this article riddled with errors from Nettuts (Nevertheless, many thanks to the author Alex Coomans and Nettuts).

After correcting all the article’s naming errors that came from copy and pasting code many times over, I had a nice starting point with associations and all that fun stuff set up.  Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of any tutorial like this, errors or not – it’s an invaluable resource for us web folk.  By not relying on a pre-built forum, it was painless to integrate our users and authentication system, along with our database of artists and user-contributed rankings.

Check out the semi-finished product here.

What’s next in the feature list?

• Email notifications if you get a reply to your topic or post.
• Tie into rankings and artists with a Twitter-like @user system, or #artist.  It would be cool to post a reply in the “Why DMB = DUMB” thread: “Hey all you haters, check out my @DaveMatthewsBand rankings, they will change your view on DMB”, and then have the text after @ link directly to your ranking.
• A challenge system: “I am calling out User X on Rankings Y.  Please explain in detail why this is your opinion, and do it now!”
• Some kind of rewards system.

Let us know what you think!