When trying to dream up the next great social website the other day, I was trying to decide on what are some of the most important features to include in a social networking site. I came up with a list of 10 features that I believe would build a great social network and I encourage anyone who is considering to start their own site to at least consider these ten features and rethink the way your site lets users interact with each other. The list isn’t all-inclusive, but its a starting point and I encourage you to submit your thoughts about what you think needs to be added by submitting a comment.

vBulletin is probably the best commercial solution for starting a forum available today because it offers a wide variety of features, an excellent administration panel and a variety of both free and commercial plugins and “products”. I have been using vBulletin’s software for the Pligg Forums for nearly two and a half years and through that time I have had to deal with a lot of spam, especially in the past few months. At first it was a rare enough problem that I was able to maintain the spam by manually removing a thread here and there once a week. Through a vigorous program of spam bot registration prevention and keyword monitoring from new users posts I have been able to keep most spam off the general forums, but it’s taken a lot of plugins and continuous work to do so.