What are your favorite messageboard features/customizations that you've seen or have?

I always love keeping my mind open to see what other forums are doing; there's so many out there it's hard to see the best of everything. Whether it's a good advertising system, cool customizations/features/add-ons, or something that helps us admins, I try to keep my eyes open.

One of my more recent features I've seen that I've liked, which is very simple, is not having to use youtube tags around youtube links to get the video to embed directly into VBulletin. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it's a huge timesaver to the users considering how many videos they post.

I also really love how you can link your registration process to the stop forum spam/spam haus websites to block registrations from known spammer IPs.

For those of you who manually screen users, one of the things I did was customize the registration approval moderation screen so that next to the IP address; the city/state/territory/province/country shows up. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but certain countries are notorious for spamming, so it speeds up my approval process big time.

What are your favorite features?

 

I love the 'thanks' feature we have on our forum, very useful and popular. It encourages people to help each other out.

 

I like mods that help with the quality of the forums by reducing spam such as signature link restrictions and posting link restrictions until they post a certain amount of times. In my case, I use 8.

 

Chatbox/Shoutbox mods are one of the best features. With it, your members and even staff can have a good time
conversing while there aren't any activities in your forums.

 

I love the shoutbox features built into my forums software.

 

I also have that for my vBulletin forum.

 

I do something similar, I use 10 posts. I might even change it to 20, because I'll get the occasional user who makes 10 worthless posts really quick so they can post that link. Anyone do more than 10?

Which one is better? My understanding is the main two are Comet Chat and Shout Box? Chatbox is just a Vbulletin plug in, correct? I need to add one of these and am torn as to which one to add. Anyone have any suggestions on this?

I have that too and members use/love it. I'm even going to add a send a hug feature too since my site deals with a lot of personal support