[csw-maintainers] Forum Software

[Maciej (Matchek) Bliziński]

2011/5/26 Trygve Laugstøl <trygvis at inamo.no>:
> Another option is Shapado [1] which is more or less a stackexchange[2] copy.
> It's a bit different than traditional forums, but has a very nice
> "community" thing to it.

Yes, it looks like a questions and answers kind of thing.  As far as
asking Solaris related questions, the solaris tag at serverfault.com
seems do the job already:

http://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/solaris

Maybe we can take a step back and ask - why do we need a forum?  What
space do we want the forum to fill?

My general thought is that mailing lists are generally not very good
at building user communities.  For developers, they're great, for but
for users, not so much.  Announcement mailing lists, yes.  But for
general interest and involvement, forums seem to be more effective.
The idea would be to lower the entry barrier.  Of course, the same
thing could constitute a different entry barrier for different people.
 One person will see a forum and say: "Cool, this is the kind of forum
I know how to use, so let me join it", while another person will say:
"What? I need to set up yet another account? No way."

I would like there to be something that people are already familiar
with.  Also, if anyone is willing to put the time in it and set up a
forum, I'll be happy with whatever choice they make.

Some additional considerations could be spam prevention (captchas,
etc) and general maintainability, something that phpbb does not excel
at.

Maciej