In Building Communities with Software, Joel starts with a lament about the lack of real-life community among programmers, but rapidly segues into an explanation of why he thinks his own forum system is better than Usenet or Slashdot. I really don't participate in Joel's forums enough to comment, but they are pretty basic. No registration system. No branching (you can only add comments to the end of a conversation, not reply to comments in the middle). No mod points. Quoting in replies is strongly discouraged. All of these are part of the design of the system, not missing features.