Specialised web forums are commonplace these days. They cover the entirety of the long tail, and are therefore indispensable for discussing obscure, and not-so-obscure, topics.
These days I wouldn’t consider making any serious purchase without at least a brief consulation of the relevant web forum. Technical problems with just about anything can usually be resolved with a well-crafted search through the appropriate forum. Put simply, the web forum is the basic unit of online community these days.
But despite their ubiquity and obvious utility they remain frustratingly limited in lots of ways. In this post I vent some of these frustrations.
