Formatting posts
If your community is likely to attract a higher percentage of inexperienced users than the norm, then this type of user is especially likely to struggle with the use of tags to format posts.
However if it could be made more like just clicking buttons/menu items in Word, that would likely improve the user experience.
Smilies
In general users seem to love them, and non-highbrow sites should always incorporate them where possible.
Having pre-formatted smilies on the site that are simply clicked-on to insert, is popular with much message board software nowadays.
Smilies can also serve to diffuse tension on message boards to an extent, as it’s sometimes easy to take something that was meant as a joke the wrong way. The use of joking/sad types of smilies can thus lighten the overall tone of a site to a small extent, which is particularly useful on the sort of site where people sometimes just come for moral support from like-minded individuals.
Users also sometimes lazily just reply to another post with the appropriate smilie, which is also good for site stats.
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