Searching for a Forum

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)

1. Looks like a forum, works like people expect a forum to work
2. Thread editing authority that can be distributed to a pool of users
3. Email notification of thread updates
4. "Pinning" entries to the top of threads (sticky threads)
5. Searching of threads and their content
6. Rating helpfulness of thread
7. Roll back in case of breakage, either accidental or intentional
8. Path for migration of existing user list
9. Copy (Backup or export) of forum contents available on duraspace owned equipment. Weekly? (If hosted externally)

Nice to have (B)

1. Private messages
2. See who's online/logged in
3. Instant messages
4. Cross linking of threads to Jira issues
5. User accounts via same mechanism as rest of our sites. (LDAP)

Not necessary

1. Post via email
2. Running behind ssl

Options

1. Confluence Community Bubbles plugin Example
   • Fails at A1 in a few ways
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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?