Coming next: Buster Answers

I’m about to extend the Buster Tests website a little further, but this time it might just qualify as exciting.

What will it do? How will it do it?

Buster Answers might remind you of forums, but they’ll have the Darragh touch. Yes, the Darragh touch.

I’ve been searching absolutely high and low for a decent forum script (even one I can modify myself) to no avail. Which is unfortunate, but (thankfully) fixable.

My primary focus with Buster Answers will be:

• SEO
  I consider, for Buster Tests, SEO to be of very high priority. It’s all about coming in as many queries as possible. Statistics show around 50% of visitors come from search engines.
• Ease of use
  No bloody waffle when it comes to the features. Private messaging, forums, sub-forums, smileys and overcomplicated forms. My audience are pupils, so my software must be simple!
• Usefulness
  The core idea behind Buster Tests is that it’s a really, really useful website. It really is. So I want to continue providing all of my users a useful service in as many ways as I can.

So there are some nice goals for me to think about. But how am I going to implement them?

Well, here’s my rough feature list showing what I plan on including into Buster Answers. I’ve thought a lot about how these things are going to work, and hopefully they’ll work very well indeed. We’ll see - I won’t know for sure until I’m there.

Thread tagging

Here, tagging is both SEO heaven and a gateway for some really cool information organisation features. Searching should also be clearer (and much easier for me to implement). I’ll be using FreeTag, which turns out to be wicked after all.

Binary starring

Starring of posts which helps to rate a) threads and b) users in a point-style system. So it can be really, really useful when it comes to knowing what people like and what content is the most important.

But it also allows something more useful for the user - the stars the user sets are saved away as favourites and so can be easily found again.

SEOage

Proper post slugs, tagging directories, good markup. The usual on that front, really.

User interface

I’ve been thinking quite hard about the UI and experimenting with it quite a bit in advance. I think I’ve finally got something worthy of being right first time, although we’ll see about that one.

Finally

If I can refine Buster Answers well enough, I might try flogging off the script.