Maybe we could take inspiration from the reddit gamedev community ?

How about a game jams section for people to find/advertise game jams and find other people to help organise them?

I definitely like the weekly featured game idea. Of course, being a game dev, I'll look for any ways I can to shameless plug a game. :P

But in all honesty, if you give people a means of promoting their games, a lot of people will come in just to promote their games. Whether that's something you want is up to you. I think it's cool, but it can create a lot of noise if you want other kinds of content. That's more of a problem for subreddits than forums, but it's worth considering.

tl;dr idk what I'm talking about

What @John Bujalski said. A sort of review area would be good.

Also places to post and share things besides just screenshots. Such as concept art. I have plenty of that XD

Since itch.io has a huge range of different games, including very weird experiments, I see a great potential for unusual mega-threads that don't exist just yet (eg. autobiographical/twine/altgames resources)!

What about a tutorial post and request section?

The most important things which keep me coming back to a forum like this are community, layout and, let's be honest, opportunity to find more players to my games. To my eyes layout, after a couple UI tweaks, will be just perfect here. It's clean, it's tidy, it's content-oriented. The community so far looks great (I have a feeling that itch.io crowd is a bit more mature, but don't prove me wrong here) and after a while it'll come down to mods/reports/rules and having fitting sections. As far as self-promo goes, it's nice to see devlog and release sections already, having weekly threads will help too.

Now a couple of ideas I'd like to reiterate or suggest:

• weekly feedback/screenshot events (like /r/gamedev does)
• a section for youtubers (gamedev videos, indie letsplays) to keep their "youtublogs" (let's heat up that gamedev + youtuber relationship we all benefit from)
• a section for distribution/publishing/promotion related discussions
• off topic section, maybe forum games too. I'm not a huge fan of those, but many people are
• tutorial/article/blog section as Median suggested (nicely tagged or grouped by the category)
• stricter rules for posts in self-promo sections to keep them less spammy (one post per game, must include screenshots)

Also, this might sound crazy and could go wrong in many ways, but what about embedding itch.io games in your posts? I think it would be pretty sweet.

Other madness would be to have an on-demand private forum section for your game, which some of the bigger/complex/multiplayer projects could benefit from, but it would cause an influx of "empty" non-dev accounts, which might not be a good thing depending on direction itch.io is moving.

So here's that for now. Let me know what you think!

One thing I'd like to see is something I've found in Reddit's Roguelike Development Community (/r/roguelikedev), every other Friday is FAQ Friday, where a thread has a specific topic on games development (such as animation, map design, mechanics ect) and game developers comment on how they approach the said topic, providing screenshots demonstrating parts of their game and how they implemented some of the aspects. Having something like that encourages a development focused discussion, have developers share their ideas and non-game developers look at insight for how certain games achieve this stuff.

Also it's best if we include non-gamedevs into this discussion, since they use the site too and we don't want to completely alienate them with game development stuff and provide some general gaming content too.

One thing I've found useful to start off a forum community is keeping the number of different discussion areas in it small. 1 or 2 sub forums max - small. It makes it more likely that people will find and talk to each other that way, which is pretty much the main thing people use a community hub for.

Let's talk retention.

What I mean by this, is that Itch as a site has several things that need to be improved (and they have been, which is great), and they all flow into this discussion for the forum as the following points:

1. How do you get people here? (Forum)
2. How do you encourage someone to come back tomorrow? (Forum)

First point is mostly about advertising the forum (big link front page when you're ready, etc). Second point is about psychology - and let's take some big pointers from forums we've all used before.

The first things that come to mind, are: Post counts (or some form of point reward system). Yes, they do encourage low value posts, but they are also a psychological reinforcement to come back (and remind users they've spent time here before). They also help to show how involved someone is within the community so a response can be properly rationalised (ie: talking to someone who's posted 10 times vs someone who's posted 10,000 times uses different phrasing, assumptions, etc). I think this is one of the first things that should be considered. Straight up

Secondly: Keeping a conversation going. Encouragement to continue a conversation is typically done via a trigger - mostly a notification that you HAVE a reply to respond to. Not sure that I've noticed this in place yet. In short, if there's no notification of responses, expect people to never return to conversations and for things to be very hit & run.

Third: Consider giving visual weight to users according to either their purchase history (little joysticks to indicate amount of games owned, etc), their development history (little space invader icons per games released), jam history, etc. Little things help to give people a feel of how much they belong. I know the crisp, clean interface is a nice thing but maybe you can run two visual styles - one by default that's more traditional forum and then the cleaner one for those who like a more pure look.

Mostly - if you want the community within the forum to grow (and therefore, the site overall), you're going to need to aim more at the players than at the devs, and you're going to need to examine other forums and see how certain things are handled.

The only thing I can say is that I'm a lot more likely to be active in a place where I can talk about my own stuff without fear of alienating people. I don't really know how to create an atmosphere that makes people feel safe to talk about the stuff they're putting so much of themselves into, but I do think being able to mention your work guilt-free is important as I think it'll encourage people to participate in more parts of the forum rather than just having a devlog thread for their games they update without going anywhere else.

Holy run-on sentence, Batman!