Choosing a forum
A forum?
People have been asking for a web forum. It could provide the following benefits:
- People could chat among themselves and figure out their own ideas for making open source a more fun place.
- In general, it would help people have more conversations on the OpenHatch site. So as a group, we could discuss neat game-mechanics ideas, that sort of thing.
- People could discuss their problems getting involved with projects.
- People could say, "Hey, I found this bitesize bug and got stuck -- what do I do next?" and have a decent chance of someone answering.
It would have the following costs:
- We'd have to maintain a forum.
- People will flame us and say that mailing lists are the answer to all of life's problems.
Okay, so which forum?
Vanilla Forum
- Pros:
- Looks friendly by default
- Nice, friendly, lightweight look
- Decent story for user integration with Django
- Could run it on a different web server, etc., since it's not Django
- Mature forum software, presumably with features and stability
- Can generate an RSS feed for a forum
- Cons:
- Since it's not Django, we'd have to try harder to maintain skinning
- If we want to incorporate Vanilla items into the front page activity feed, we'd have to try harder.
- No mailing list integration
DjangoBB
- Pros:
- Looks like nicest Django web forum
- Cons:
- Would have to run it on the main server, meaning it could worsen load problems
FUDForum
- Pros:
- Email list integration!
- Can generate an RSS feed for a forum
- Cons:
- Ugly by default (but it's actually quite skinnable)