What Makes A Proboard A PROboard?

All of them! I tend not to join many ProBoards forums now, probably because there isn't any that interest me.

Activity and Layout, especailly

And the friendlinessness

=p

=]

I say Layout and Friendliness/Community...

Set-up and community. A good forum can't have so few rules that there is porn posted everywhere and nobody gives it a single thought. Organization is really important to have a clean, good looking forum. Oh, and of course the community has to be warm and welcoming, that will draw mostly anybody to the place.

I'd say friendly community and a good layout is all for me. I design forum layouts and it really disturbs me if the forum doesn't have a decent design/colours to accompany with the friendly community.

>.<

I chose the community and amount of activity. If you don't have an active community, then you don't have anything. Great ProBoards have existed with the default layout, so its not layout. Many forums don't stand out to me, but they're still great forums to others. Management of the forum (rules, etc.) is definitely important, but as long as everyone realitively gets along on a forum, great management isn't always needed. Chatspeak (I assume is the same as netspeak) is annoying, but it's still communication.

The thing that a forum can't succeed without is a community. It's like owning a shop but never having any customers, it just doesn't work. The second, requiring a community to exist, is activity. Not having activity on a forum is like owning that shop with 100's of windows shoppers but shoppers who never buy anything, it just doesn't work.