Appropedia:Forums: Difference between revisions

We've been talking about installing a forum being implemented for Appropedia (April 2007) should meet these requirements:

Why

• Provides an easy way to engage for the many, many people who find a wiki daunting.
• Provides an easy way to have discussion on particular areas, e.g. groups of pages or activities.
• An easy way to monitor discussions, bring active threads to the top, and make important threads "sticky".

Desired features

Single login with wiki

Should be easy enough with an OpenID backend. (Sounds easy, but haven't tried.)

Smooth integration with Appropedia's other platforms

Some advantage here with a WordPress-based forum, as it should deal with blog logins at the same time.

Ability to embed forums or forum threads into an Appropedia page.

Appropedia:Widgets seems the obvious way - we need to test how well this works.

Open source

For practical reasons (easier for us to tweak, we can get all features for free) and reasons of principle.

Sticky threads

For important announcements, guidelines

Possibly desired features

Replace talk pages with forum pages

We talked about this in early days - there's no obvious way to do this within the site,

Email notification of replies. (phpBB does this - e.g. http://forums.permaculture.org.au)

This may actually be a disadvantage, according to one writer about online community, as it means people don't have to revisit the site to check for answers. (My feeling is that people can still forget to come back, and it is a useful feature. --Chriswaterguy 22:21, 7 April 2011 (PDT))

Proposed solutions

• phpBB^W proven and highly supported
• Simple:Press[1]
• BBPress[2] - should integrate nicely with WordPress, but a standalone install.
• Drupal^W
  • only feasible if we have a committed Drupal person pretty much on call. Drupal is much trickier than WordPress.
  • highly customizable, but we probably don't need this much power if we just want a simple forum.
• Vanilla Forums[3]
  • looks easy to use
  • can be embedded in WordPress
  • not clear that we'd be able to export easily (they seem to be working on an export tool, and even then it depends on the format). However, being open source makes it likely that there'll be an export solution.

Next steps (April 2011)

Make a shortlist, then install them on our dev site, test and see which we like.

Is anyone interested in doing this?

Policies

This page is a proposed Appropedia policy.You can edit or discuss it on the talk page or at the Appropedia policy discussion page. For now, this should be considered an essay by one or more Appropedians, and not as a policy or guideline.Read more...

The forum will operate under these policies:

• Be friendly and positive: Relevant wiki policies of civility, no personal attacks, not disrupting to make a point...
• The policy of rigor is less strictly applied, as the forum can be a place for questions and wild ideas. Though if someone is promoting perpetual motion machines or other baseless claims (e.g. the water fuel cell), we may gently point to this policy and explain why we don't give attention to such things; if someone insists on exploring such ideas, we can ask them to take it to the PES wiki, or to come back when they have a working model, or when they want to focus on other issues.
• All posts are released under the CC-by-sa License, so that relevant content can be easily adapted for use in the wiki (or elsewhere) with attribution. (Attribution in the edit summary is enough when contributing to the wiki? This way it's equivalent in attribution terms to the person posting it directly to the wiki.)