I've been thinking about the future of anonymous communities for a while. Most text/imageboard scripts try to mimic older sites, instead of trying to advance the state of the art. The rare new feature is added with a hack, without any fundamental re-thinking.
Here are some random ideas I've come up with. Not all of them are feasible or good.
- Tags instead of separate boards. A single message (or image, for imageboards) can apply to many distinct topics. These tags could be editable by people besides the topic starter (because the OP might not bother to say /request/ or whatever). Readers could filter based on tags they want and tags they want to avoid.
- Realtime. I don't know how realtime would work for an imageboard, but for text, an anonymous IRC-type system might be good.
- Direct support for CBZ/CBR/ZIP/RAR archives of images. It could also have built-in support for viewing the images inside the archives and generating thumbnails. PDFs and other formats could be supported too.
- Integration with other sites. YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and other sites all have nice APIs. There are a lot of possibilities here.
- Video and sound. A music-board would be cool, although you'd probably have some copyright infringement claims to deal with. I think some image boards already support video, but I don't know if any are built for it from the ground-up.
- User moderation, voting, threading, and other features from different types of forums. I don't necessarily believe that these are all good ideas, but perhaps some of them can be improved upon.
- Name registration (like on IRC) instead of tripcodes. (inb4 flames)
- Private communication between anonymous posters. Find a post that interests you and click a button that says "message the author privately." This would be useful in a lot of situations (giving out an email address, asking an off topic question, hitting on camwhores, etc). It wouldn't require using a tripcode, it could be based on cookies or your IP. It should be possible for the author of a post to "disown" that post and stop receiving private comments directed at it. Naturally it would also be possible to reply to these messages.
Discuss.