The Perfect Flash Forum

[rockonmetal]

Ok, I was wondering if this is a good idea or if this is just a waste of good time and good money...

I have a site, I want to make it really cool... One way is to make a flash forum... Here are some features I thought of:
1. Animation like sliding forums
2. Refreshes/updates every 1,5,10,30, or 60 seconds to check for user pm's responses or new threads.
3. Solved Button
4. Nice interactive images...
5. Preloaders to load the first basic peice of code which will check to see what the user's internet connection is then either load the whole forum or only the basic parts based on what the connection/download speed is.
6. Clean/Basic feature which will take the lag away by making the images and actions user friendly though leaving the major components *basicly all the fancy touches are taken off...*
7. This will be very fancy unless on clean or basic mode...
I am not looking for someone to design this because its still in the thinking stage...
I ask:
What will I need for this?
What else could I add to make this cool...
Is this possible todo without getting the user fustrated...

[DanielDunn]

First of all im not sure if this is even possible. If it is it would not be just made of of ActionScript. Depending of which forum you would like you would have to have like Php extensions.(Not exactly sure myself). You would have to know a great deal of coding.

If all this is possible and you can do all this, It would be a great addition. :)

[SuperRoach]

The problem with flash vs html is still the same as before - html is compatible in more browsers.

Animation like sliding/fading forums can be done with addons like jQuery, which is very neat. Arguably more extensable than actionscript with less code too.

AJAX can be used to poll for new messages/posts

Solved button? I think that could be done very easily too.

Interactive images you might have a positive there. HTML Only has a primitive canvas - flash has a rich playground. Storing that will be a problem however.

6 - now this is by far the largest advantage with html. If you are bandwith restricted, you turn images off. A lot of recent forums cope very well with it. On top of that, they work scaled down to mobile phones. And to me, thats the selling point. If I can't check my forum from the phone, I'm not as interested in checking it

[hussulinux]

http://www.tufat.com/s_flash_bulletin_board_phpbb_vbulletin.htm