HyperKitty a step back in usability

For me forums have several drawbacks:

1. Most forum software is unthreaded. Means that you cannot easily tell which post a person is replying to; posts are simply appended at the end. It is impossible to skip whole sub-discussions if one goes off-topic. It's also extremely easy to lose track of a request or a question made a couple of posts ago if some other sub-discussion is lively and inserts a lot of messages after that request (because it's not obvious that there is an open sub-thread that hasn't been answered yet).

2. Most forum software doesn't allow me to do individual things to posts. I cannot mark a post as important, or to be answered later. I cannot move or copy a post to my folder named »important stuff«. I cannot remove posts that I consider irrelevant in order to keep the number of posts I may have to look through later small. I cannot remove obvious spam and have to rely on moderators doing their job.

In short: the forum software doesn't support me in organizing myself at all. I have to rely on external tools a lot (e.g. manage some kind of TODO list in which I use URLs pointing to individual forum posts).

3. People can often remove their own posts. While this has its use, it also has the potential to make a whole discussion seem nonsensical later on. »What the hell are all those guys replying to?« is a question I had to ask myself in the past, only because the question that was asked had been removed later by the poster.

4. Search functions vary in usefulness. There are too many forums in which it is frowned upon to have multiple topics about the same piece of software, for example. This leads to topics with literally thousands of messages, and the forum's search functionality is often not up to it. »Sent by myself between January and March with a topic that matches XYZ and the body that matches ABC« is something I can do in my email program; it's nothing I've ever been able to do properly in a forum.

5. Nefarious moderators may remove content they consider inappropriate for whatever reason. Granted, this is not often a real issue, but if you do have a personal problem with a moderator then good luck getting anything done on that forum.