How would you all feel about this? Is it necessary, or does it feel redundant since we already have XMPP, Mumble, and E-mail for alternative communication?

i dont know what xmpp or mumble are and my email is generally private lol :') but i dont really think anyone would dm me but up to you! i think any would be cool

Forum Friends / Best Friends Would be interesting, the messaging however would be somewhat complicated...

Find a miniboard or PHP plugin for forum DMs, if that exists.

If you have infinite dev time:

Add a whisper button to the userlist next to each user; whispers are forum threads and are limited to two participants, visible only to them. Consider copying PHP code from normal threads to implement this with access control middleware.

Unread messages create e-mail alerts or a page banner on every refresh.

Not a bad idea. I'll see if I can do that.

Maybe we can have profile comments too? I've seen a few Xenforo forums that have that and I feel it'd add another layer of community to all of this.

@bradtober
Profile comments implemented. Barebones, but I doubt I need to add more to them anyway, so I can probably leave them as is. You can disable them in your profile settings.

@guestgeist
Your suggestion is next. I happen to indeed have infinite dev time, so I'll most likely implement this by tomorrow. Unfortunately, since Minibord is an extremely obscure project, there aren't really any 'plugins' of any kind that I could just find and slap in on a moments basis; Everything you see here has to be coded directly into the base software and become a part of it.
There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That just means that, for me, I'll have lots of control over how it'll interface with everything else, which is fine by me.

Hopefully this will ignite a heavy sense of community here! Perhaps we could try a few advertising campaigns soon, directed towards people who may share similar interests as we do? I'm not sure how we'd do it, but it'd be worth a shot. Word of mouth?

Workin on it!!!!!

Consider this the place to discuss that update now.

Profile comments have been implemented. Disable them if you don't like them.
You can now send messages to other users by clicking on Whisper in their profile. You can create group chats by creating a conversation at messages.php
Notifications system now implemented. You can watch threads to receive notifications if new posts are sent in them. You'll receive notifications when you get a message or a profile comment as well!

Currently holding off on the friends system because I feel it'd stray too bit from the site's original goals, but maybe I'm just being silly, and it'd probably help enhance the site. Let me know what you all think.

i like to think that our little community are all friends so i dont think a friend feature is necessary at least at this moment. this forum thingy is getting put together quite nicely though and hopefully itll grow :D

I like the new changes! Haven't gotten a notification yet from anything but I am a real big fan of everything. It's evolving, and I get to be one of the people in the front row watching it all happen in front of our eyes o

Excited to see what the future holds in store for us all.

I don't think a friend system is needed yet either. Maybe in the future, but for now I think we're all friends already.