[Devel] Started some research on forums integration

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2011, Mark Freeman wrote:

> Hey everyone.  I started some research on forums integration.  I haven't 
> installed any of them yet, but I did review a few of the options. 
> GroupServer definitely has the features we want.  However, has anyone 
> seen AskBot?  It's a stack overflow style forum written within django. 
> Should be installable as an addon module and can use existing 
> registration/authorization.

Kracekumar brought up OSQA, which seems good too.

I spent a few minutes longer looking at the Vanilla site, and it seems 
that maybe http://vanillaforums.org/addon/636/emailsubscribe is a plugin 
that turns any web forum category into an email list, effectively?

Oh, actually, I guess it doesn't handle inbound mail.

> A link to my current research on the subject.
>
> OHForums - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eBEKoAYVF3KnB-m34bGSdIx7tQb0sy9THgYsZ366HHE/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CKSx5ZQM

Nice.

w/r/t AskBot and OSQA, it seems to me that general discussion is separate 
from question-answering. Question answering-type systems are organized for 
the situation where many people have similar questions, so it's good to be 
able to find an answer. For uses like the ones at 
http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue448 , I think we're going to want 
discussion, too -- for example, if people want to get advice on how to run 
events.

To throw another monkey wrench into the soup (?), FUDForum does seem to 
have a "mailing list manager" plugin, and I've used it in the past and 
been kind of disappointed at how ugly it is out of the box, but maybe it's 
worth taking a fresh look.

Also, if you feel like maintaining this doc on the OpenHatch wiki, that'd 
be neat. If not, we can put a copy there at the end so that history is 
recorded there.

-- Asheesh.