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.

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)

Phorum

 * Pros:
 * Email list integration. Use two addon modules:
 * http://www.phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?62,140380 and http://www.phorum.org/phorum5/read.php?62,129244,129244#msg-129244