IGN

IGN (Imagine Games Network) is a video game and entertainment media website. It includes a forum. Even though the website has many discussion topics, main focus is on gaming, and gaming on different platforms.

Users can register by providing a unique username and e-mail. After confirming their e-mail, they can start engaging with the community.

In profile page, information about when the user joined and when they were last online is shown. Latest activity of users (posts they created, they replied to, reacted to) can be reached. An about page of a user include the personal information they want to share (gender, birth date, etc.), followers, members they follow, and trophies which are given for specific reasons such as for a post that receives high interaction, or for helping community grow by creating specific amount of posts, replies, and messages.

Users can connect some other platforms (Steam, twitter) to their profile.

Posts and threads can be bookmarked. Threads have tags. Posts can be shared on various social platforms pretty easily. Users can write their thoughts in a post, or they can reply to another post in the thread, or quote something said to comment on it. They can give reactions to posts, each user's accumulated reaction count is displayed on their profile page. Posts can be reported by providing a reason. Users can choose to watch threads, so that they get notified about further discussion there.

Gaming-related side of the forum is divided into sub-forums for different platforms.

The forum has a great search functionality. Users can search keywords in the whole website, in a specific forum, in a specific thread, or they can search for threads by title. They can also filter by member, post date, and tag.

Users can choose which info they provided will be displayed on their profile page such as their personal info, online status, bookmarks.

GameFAQS

GameFAQs is a website that hosts FAQs and walkthroughs for video games. GameFAQs hosts an active message board community, which has a separate discussion board for each game in the site's database, along with a variety of other boards.

Users can register by providing a unique username and e-mail. After confirming their e-mail, they can start engaging with the community.

Each user has a karma level that determines how often they can create topics and messages. This is to prevent abusive people from negatively affecting others by spamming. Their levels increase as their account lifetime progresses or when their contribution to community receives positive reactions. Users can display their game collection on their profile page. The games they rated also can be found there. Users can be friends. Users can track games and topics to get notified about new discussion about them.

Developers also have their own page where the games they developed are displayed.

Most of the games have these specific relevant pages: data, guides, cheats, QA, board. Data is where information about the game such as the developer and description can be found. Guides page includes walkthroughs and tips. Users can also create guides for game they know well, charts and maps are supported. Cheats page consists of commands for specific actions or off the beaten track tips and shortcuts. QA is for short questions and quick answers. Board page is the heart of the forum where people intensely discuss with each other.

Site has great search functionalities. Users can search for games, game search results can be filtered by platform, distribution, category, release date, region and company. In the board page for a specific game, a keyword can be searched in the threads of that game.

The Gamer's Forum

README page of this github repository gives detailed description.

Video Game Forum

README page of this github repository includes some features.