I would reely love an "edit last post" fuction.

Hmm....
Figle this sounds very familiar :p
Anything you want to tell peops??? (wink wink, nudge nudge)

I agree, there should be categories in this forum, as they would make navigating it much easier. For example, this would make it easy to avoid threads where accusations of multi-accounting are taking place, as these would be in a "suspected cheater" category.

Ensuring threads are in the correct category should not be hard if moderators have the power to move threads.
I understand the next version of phpDiplomacy will have moderators.

The main problem with categories is threads drifting off-topic, but such threads could be locked. Locking takes place in many forums, but it risks creating hostility to the moderators, who may have not thought through the situation.

A good solution would be strict rules for posting in the forum. This way other posters can tell the poster what the rules are when they are broken. Moderators would still have a part when posts need to be deleted or moved, but they would have much less work to do.

In my opinion, the category's needed would be:
-Development (sensible discussion about features and new versions of phpDiplomacy)
-Bugs/Feature requests (this should be separate from development because this is probably where "bugs" from "noobs" will be posted. Anything important can be moved to development)
-Games (new games, tournaments, NO commenting on games in-progress)
-Abuse (multi-accounting, meta-gaming, etc)
-Private
-Chat (everything else!)

Oh, an edit last post feature would be good as well!

that was my view: give moderators power to stop and move threads!
I don't think the development category would be needed, firstly as very very little is done that is not by Kestas himself. The other things would be useful as suggested. I don't quite know why you wouldn't allow game progress in the games thread however, as long as it was limited to the thread which started the game (assuming it had a reason). Otherwise, I would agree with you.

Allowing players to comment on games they are playing moves into the murky area of meta-gaming

i agree 150%, but i have another suggestion... along with the "edit last post" option, if you posted a comment/thread, you should have the option to edit it or remove it completely. i think this would help those of us who post something one minute, then look at it the next and call ourselves idiots. just my two cents...

Actually, I'm having second doubts on editing/deleting posts. Maybe it should only be allowed if no-one else has posted yet. Otherwise the thread becomes impossible to follow.

The forum is something that Ive thought about. The problem is there's no forum system designed to be integrated into an existing system, the closest thing is Drupal, which lets you integrate your system into an existing one.

This means that phpDip either needs to become a Drupal module (something I have considered), or come up with its own forum system, but a forum system isn't something that hasn't been done before, and it's not Diplomacy related, so it does seem like a waste of time.

But at the moment we may have gained quite a lot of users, but not enough to justify a full forum system, so I think for now some minor adjustments can be made to accommodate the current user base, putting off (or permanently resolving) the need to upgrade to a large forum system.

I'm not sure about having multiple tabs though. Personally I wouldn't want to click 5 times to check for new posts in each category, and we don't get enough new posts to justify that. (Whether that's actually /because of/ the poor forum system is a tricky question, but anyway..)

It seems like what's needed is just a way to make things a little tighter. Instead of having a full post, containing the first item in the thread, the forum should only list the titles, users, times, replies, etc. And instead of a large gap between posts posts would be squashed together.
This way I think all the new posts from a certain day would fit within single screen, and that's a fine compromise.

Editing posts requires a whole new UI function, so I don't think that'd be worth it. A "preview" button wouldn't need anything new though, so that could be added instead.

Also I think private messages were mentioned. Again the problem is that this needs new UI functionality, and I don't think it'd be worth it. With the forum system I really want to keep it simple, and if it turns out that it can't be kept simple any longer then I'd rather go to any lengths to use an existing forum system than write a new one.

Bottom line: I think all that's needed is for forum posts to be crunched up together. Even on popular forums the "new posts" list rarely goes over one screen, and I think "new posts" are all most people are interested in.
Making things more space-efficient, adding pagination, possibly a preview button, and making the screen go down to the last viewed post when you click "open thread", are the only changes on the todo list this time around.
If things expand more (and I don't think they'll expand much more) then some other functionality may be needed.

By the way the tightening up of forum posts also applies to game listings, which could be much tighter, more informative and visually appealing. A semi-table-like view that fills up all the horizontal space would work much better than the current bullet-point thing

there should be a special category named "figlesquidge"

Instead of tabs, how about selecting the category the post belongs to. At the top the post, the category (game/bug/etc) would be displayed along with the title and poster's name. Seems like less work than tabs. I wonder if it would be too much work to ad functionality to sort or filter posts. So, if someone was only interested in "bug" posts, for example, then they could filter the forum to only show those posts.

Haha, I second alamothe.

Anyways, I don't think we have enough people or posts to justify any massive re-organization.

My only beef with the current forum is that threads with interesting information eventually fall from view. It would be cool if some sort of archive with important information was kept. A sticky sort of system, though they don't necessarily have to occupy the top of the page like they do in most forums. I suppose that this will become much easier to do when moderators are implemented, because they could decide which threads are very useful and good for archiving and future reference.