- CAVX
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- Exalted Legendary Member
I was going to make a stupid one-liner (edit: not directed at the users above me! I love you guys) but I realized that this question is worth it to me. Plus it actually stimulates discussion a lot more than the recent "pick a random site feature and ask a simple question" template that has been plaguing this forum.
It's hard for me to be active in more than one community. Bungie has been that one community I go to for a long time now (albeit on and off), but there were plenty of communities I visited before it that were almost just as equally awesome.
That said, there are some great differences in my mind.
For one, Bungie.net is like an "official community", which means that, like most communities, it's centered around one company, concept, or product; the difference lies in the fact that it's officially sanctioned by the company it supports. That in itself is not unique, but it's better executed than most communities in this scenario. It presents itself well and the entity-to-fan relationship is very strong and down-to-earth here. That, and it's not at all limited to anything in particular. Take the current state of the community, where so many people are here but there's not a ton of reason for us to be until more information about the new IP is released.
Primarily, though, I thought it was pleasantly different in terms of user experience. At the time I joined Bungie, communities were starting to become packaged and gain a lot more features. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was reaching the stage where a lot of forums started implementing so many unnecessary and flashy features that things became obtrusive. Bungie.net was wandering in that direction for a while, too - when the community was smaller - with things like embedded signatures and color tags, but still not nearly as bad as a primary offender. The difference was that where many other sites started unnecessarily increasing their clutter, Bungie decided to tone it down, and kept it simple in a very good way. For example, these forums don't include embedded signatures or a lot of flashy pointless features (the one I can think of is limited to already-used space). It's clean and easy to read. There are no emoticons, no junk, no anything. I've created my own framework for forums since then, and the concept of minimalist design here really inspired my design choices - and my choice to try my hand at forums in the first place.
Note that I'm not saying that new features are bad. There are a lot of new features that would be great here, and I'd love a new layout and a general site overhaul. I'm just saying that instead of cluttering up the site, they stepped back and looked at things objectively, and they understood what was really necessary. It makes the forums a lot more intuitive.
[Edited on 05.04.2012 3:04 PM PDT]