Ingame Forum
 

I've long been intrigued by the idea of an ingame message board as an alternative to an online web forum and in my search I've scoured every imaginable site I can think of only to find one or two projects, both outdated and long disbanded.

Along the way I came across information mentioning the difficulty involved in developing such an addon...
I'm not a developer so I have no clue as to why that is, or even if it's true...
Anyone able to enlighten me in layman's terms?

Addons cannot connect to the internet which means no way to keep a database for everyone to sync to for their in game forum. There's a bit more but, don't really need to go more in-depth from what I've already stated.

So I guess the ingame calendar is an exception to that because it's a Blizzard module?

The ingame calendar is like any other part of the UI, it uses functions to request data from Blizzard's servers. There is no "Internet connection" there. The only exception to "Internet connection" in the UI is when the help UI accesses Blizzard's help articles.

Actually, it is in fact possible to do what you are asking. However, the richness of the feature will be hamstrung by throttling in addon message traffic. So you probably won't find that its any better than using the in-game guild and communities UI that already saved a limited number of offline messages.

You can use addon communications to tell people currently online about your new message. If you then go offline, they can forward it on to other people who come online. Of course, this requires them to know each other... so it would only really work in a setting like a guild.

There will be important decisions to make: when different clients log on/off at different times, how do you decide which content to keep and what to discard? And can you do this without saturating the addon comms to the point where the addon breaks because of throttling?

And can you do all of this while respecting people's privacy, and having a means to 'delete messages' that, again, with throttled comms makes it possible for other clients to recognize it needs to delete their own copy of the message? If you add other features, like 'pinning' and 'unpinning' messages, that further adds complexity and consumes scarce bandwidth.

So, yes its possible. But doing it right would be hard, and not for much gain.

Well, and you would not be able to update your copy of the forum if you login and you are the only person online. And if you are alone, no one else would be able to see anything you post until you login later while someone else is online.

Just use a real forum, chat, or message board.

Okay so let me reshape my initial question and focus on an example scenario!

Say I want to advertise or announce something to fellow guild or community members by to pinning a notice with a message in shared space...

Would that be possible? Could you create an addon that works similar to a bulletin board!

There used to be an addon my guild used in BC (the first one) called GuildBB.

In spite of all the challenges an in-game forum faces it worked quite well at the time.
For some things it was superior to a website forum, in that the challenge of getting players to create an account > apply > visit a forum is at the very least comparable if not greater than the resistance some players have to installing addons, but after that barrier was overcome they access the in-game forum the same way they access the game .. by logging in.

Nowadays I find it hard to see benefits over something like Discord which in large part has replaced traditional guild forums.

TL;DR: Possible? Yes, it has been done before. Is it likely someone will invest the effort? I think not.

Isn't there a note space in the guild UI now?

/edit: that wouldn't work for people outside your guild, though. But again, for something not stored on the Blizz servers, you would still run into the issue where there *must* be someone else logged in when you post said announcement, and they have to be online when someone else logs in to pass it along to their client, and they must be online when someone else logs in, etc, etc.