Goal
The Fedora development community is considering the use of a forum/message board to replace the existing users and developers email lists.
Requirements
Must have (A)
- Looks like a forum, works like people expect a forum to work
- Thread editing authority that can be distributed to a pool of users
- Email notification of thread updates
- "Pinning" entries to the top of threads (sticky threads)
- Searching of threads and their content
- Rating helpfulness of thread
- Roll back in case of breakage, either accidental or intentional
- Path for migration of existing user list
- Copy (Backup or export) of forum contents available on duraspace owned equipment. Weekly? (If hosted externally)
Nice to have (B)
- Private messages
- See who's online/logged in
- Instant messages
- Cross linking of threads to Jira issues
- User accounts via same mechanism as rest of our sites. (LDAP)
Not necessary
- Post via email
- Running behind ssl
Options
- Confluence Community Bubbles plugin Example
- Fails at A1 in a few ways
- Forumotion (or in the wiki)
- Covers A1-A4
- Appears to search only thread topics (not post contents)
- Provides a reputation scheme for both users and messages
- Does backups, allows rollbacks
- Migration of existing list is not clear
- No ability to do local backups
- Covers B1-B3, not B4 or B5
- phpBB
- Provides the backend for Forumotion forum (see above) so all features listed there are available.
- Large number of plugins available.
- Well known and widely used.
- Can try this out using JumpBox. It runs on EC2 for free for an hour.
- User Guide
- JForum
- Software looks good and has many features, but website linkage to their jira is broken and appears to have been for a while. Is the project still ongoing?