What are your favorite OOC forums to have on a site? What has really worked for you, or have you seen work? What has worked to build your community outside of roleplaying forums?

Probably a chat/rant forum because if something amazing or something really irritating happened that day then I like to talk about it in that forum. Also the games section is always fun.

A bunch of AGers are absolute cbox addicts, myself included. Our cbox went down for a few hours yesterday and I could hardly function the rest of the night. :lol:

The best thing I've done for OOC forums is the Gifting Center. It's for graphics, but it's not a gallery or graphics request forum, since I find those to be ridiculous on an RPG. You post site fanart, things like character blends and icons, as well as graphics you made for other members on the forum. Most of the time they don't ask for them, so it's a fun treat and helps them feel more connected.

Well, I'm very BIG on forum games (haha, bet everyone guessed that already!). Forums games are something where: 1. the staff gets to know the members 2. the members get to know the staff and 3. the members get to know each other. Plus, forum games set up some great plottage :)

Hot Topics is great, too. It covers a lot of things: Entertainment, politics, and anything in the news. I like to get my members' view/viewpoint on certain subjects.
Lastly, I like to have a Random section where members 'rant/ramble' about things that's been on their minds (like the one here!). My members really appreciate that one.

The above has continually worked for me on forums, along with the cbox. With all of those things combined, I have found that the forum isn't just a forum anymore, but rather a community of people with the common interest in the genre of the RPG & role playing. :D

chat threads can be fun SO LONG AS it doesn't take over the site. I left a site once because I tend to use the "last # posts" and "active topics" options and whenever I logged in on this site there'd be pages of nothing but replies to the chat thread.

Its nice to see graphics help threads and sections where people talk oocly about in character stuff because they want to, rather than because an admin has asked their opinion. On one board I was on, we had a debate about whether gay people would be effected by the magic of same or opposite sex veela, for example.

The forum games, chat box and rumors pages are usually a lot of fun. I try to get some RPing done in between, though. On one site I'm a member of, people (myself included) fully admit that the C-box and games forums take up most of their posts. =)

I'm not so much talking about the standard forums you have on every site. I'm wondering about the unique ones that have stood out, maybe in the past, that other sites didn't have.

For example, one of my forums has a special rant forum for when you just feel like being a kid and yelling and being immature. It's rather unique among rant forums, and hard to reproduce because of the special mix of people on that site. It also has some "I just want to talk about something lame and this is the best place to put it..."