Trough visiting a great amount of game forums and posting in their suggestion and development sections, I recognized that the usual structure of forums is quite imperfect for game development. This is quite a problem in games which envolve an community in the deveopment process, First problem is the quantity of post,which leads to repetition of questions and the phenomen that important ideas are often overlooked Second for new people in aforum its often hard to get a basic overview without reading several days trough forums before posting.This also often leaves to errors in seperating facts from speculations. Third Some ideas and concept like hierachy for clans ,interaction and relation of elemental types , experience and skill system are hard to explain in term of words but could easily be represented graphically. To solve these problems I want to make some suggestions hoping that someone will be convinced to create an appropriate forum programm. Also i want to encourage other people to make suggestions in this direction. 1)Every subforum should have an "table of contents" section where the forum users could create categories of content and add the links of topics to a category.(The Moderator only would have to either accept or refuse the topics and links while the community itself would/could generate the table of contents.) Also it should be possible to not only add links but also texts to a category(used to make summarys of the category and lists of what features on this category where "already" decided. This is to prevent confusion about the status of the topic) 2)When logging in the name of the logged in person should be visible AND it should be either possible to directly message this person or the peron automatically should join a chatlog when logging in.(this should reduce the amount of unnecessary questions and reduce the misunderstandings before posting) 3) it would be nice if the moderator could mark topics and single post of a topic with certain colors.(this would enable to highlight important stuff or to show that things that got accepted or refused etc. I am sure the possibilities are large) 4)A graphical programm combatible with the forum should be on the forumpage enabling to graphically describe some concepts and to directly putting those graphis into the posts. (it only has to do simple stuff like connecting several topic names in rectangles and ovals with certain types of lines and arrows which maybe have names beside them, altough even paint can do that most forum do not really support putting something like this in. Well that are my bacis Ideas I hope you find them appropriate and can even add more.

To me, the first idea sounds almost Wiki-like. It's been discussed on GameDev that a Wiki may be a useful tool but nothing has yet emerged in the way of testing out this concept. The idea would be to refer people to the wiki before posting a question. Wikis by their very nature are updated and evolved by the community thus keeping this resource up-to-date and relevant. Of course, people will still have to ask questions, thus the need for the forums.

The rest of your points sound, well, a lot like groupware systems. Groupware has been used a lot in business for many years to allow remote colleagues to share documents, messages and even host virtual meetings including some of the features you describe. I can't really see GameDev evolving into groupware yet (at least not in the next few years) as these systems are typically expensive to run, require more server resources and human technical support than your average message board / forum setup.

If you wish to take a look at some open-sourced groupware systems, take a look at SourceForge and search for "Groupware". The results will show several projects that are been actively developed by the sf community.