Image, video and pdf optimizations. It can save any site owner a ton of money and space. Especially since mobile phones have good cameras and enough space these days, which means the average image dimension is very big, which means each image is at least 3-4mb big (and bigger). So when they upload it, it should automatically be optimized by the forum software itself. It adds up quickly. I think image/video/pdf uploads are by far the most common type of attachments uploaded so having them optimized to save disk space is, bandwidth is a given, no? Especially since images are embedded most of the time, which means having them optimized means quicker loaded pages by default.
Wikipedia tools for example.
All forums have a niche, some broader some more special. And in our niches we can build a knowledge database. News articles can't offer that, Discord can't offer that, Youtube can't offer that, no other site can offer specialized categorized information for that niche. You can rant about games on other platforms, but if you want to look up information, you need to visit a Wiki.
As an example when Elden Ring came out (game of the year 2022), for weeks I used a Wiki to look up missions and where items are. I could watch for hours some youtube videos and find out the answer to my question, or just quickly use the wiki of that game. As a forum we could offer that (for any niche), if we had the tools.
Categorization and organization. It is such a broad term and not easy to explain since it varies from niche to niche. But I believe what forums make special is the power of categorizing things.
For example Twitter or Facebook, those are live timelines. You post, and you forget about it. Nobody goes to Twitter and checks out your tweets from 3 weeks ago. That is old news. They are there for the recent thing. And all old tweets are forgotten and buried, nobody cares and moves on each day.
YT specializes obviously in video and Instagram in images. We can't compete with them. We can offer video and image uploads, but we can't beat them at their own game. Too big for us.
Now reddit should be the rolemodel but actually reddit also lacks a lot of things. They do content delivery well and their subreddits make it special. But they also lack categorization. Organizing things on there is like hell. So funny, they are allowed to only have 2 stickies, so making announcements is very hard. Their sidebar and prefixes is the only way in categorizing things.
Now, we with our node structure, prefixes, custom fields have the power of organizing things. But we need more focus in that. Content filtering is missing for example. Content searching is underdeveloped. We could offer organized and categorized structures for the reader where the threads and posts are the attached discussions to those organized/categorized structures.
The Media Gallery and the RM are attempts of such organized structures, just completely left for dead for 10 years now (2013/2014) and not well integrated to threads. It must not be its own entity outside of the thread system, it must be integrated into threads. And within the thread/node entities it must be filterable, searchable, categorizable. And I think a Wiki system is needed. So, keyword linking, table of contents, etc.
Then there are other tools which can be implemented but are not necessarily forum-specific. For example maps, dynamic tables, graphs are good ways for content creation tools. Right now we only have the editor, so we can only write. Plus polls, we can use polls. But we can't create tables, maps or graphs.
As an example look
at this forum, where they have their own custom methods of creating graphs on their own articles. It is embedded and dynamic. Imagine being able to do that in our posts.
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Nobody denies that "content is king", right? So, we need assisting tools to create and organize content. I think XF's core (plus some addons) are good enough for moderating the content. Probably the best thing what XF offers. No other platform provides such moderation tools. The permission system is rock solid, it can still be further extended though (control over the attachments is lacking as an example). So, I don't need another "2FA" tool or another "cookie consent" tools. Those are good to have, surely, but they provide 0 assist for the content. They are just a utility for site access.
Hope I explained what I meant.